The Most Eye-Catching Packaging Design of 2018: How It Tells a Product's Story and Enters Our Lives

Watch how packaging changes and you may see what this world has turned into.

The packaging design site Dieline recently named the 50 most-watched product packages of 2018, across food, electronics, skincare, health products and more. The site — devoted to “treating packaging design as an art exhibition”, and in the habit of summing up and forecasting packaging trends every year — entered its 12th year in 2019.

That packaging matters is by now close to a consensus. As Dieline founder Andrew Gibbs has put it, “packaging is the direct link between consumers and brands” — “the products we buy represent the values we hold, and brand packaging carries those values to us off the shelf.” Consumption keeps shifting, and we have grown used to products “dressing up,” even to looks coming first, with new tricks every year.

Dieline is one of the most-visited packaging design sites in the world; its team hands out the “Dieline Awards” for outstanding packaging every year and runs design competitions. By 2007, Andrew Gibbs was two years out of CalArts, where he had studied graphic design. That year, in his twenties, he began running the blog Dieline, sharing the packaging he and his team found important and beautiful.

More than a decade later, Gibbs and his team have summed up, year after year, the new ways packaging and consumption tie together — while consumption, markets and the world itself have changed enormously. At the start of 2019, Dieline published a piece saying, “We've always picked out the best packaging, but talking about packaging alone is no longer enough. We need to think about how people experience brands, and how brands are deeply intertwined with our lives and with culture as a whole.”

And indeed, over 2018 the argument about plastic waste polluting the environment grew louder, and marijuana legalization was quietly reshaping the cannabis industry and the food business around it; curiosity about foreign cultures and traditional motifs, and city dwellers' longing for contact with nature, could all be read off packaging — in its patterns, colors and typefaces, even in how it is torn open and kept.

The Japanese designer Yuji Tokuda once made a “twistable plastic bottle” for ilohas mineral water: an eco-friendlier bottle that used less material and, thanks to the twist, was easier to recycle. It helped make ilohas the best-selling mineral water in Japan at the time. In an interview with QDaily, he said, “Design is the story that connects a product and the person who buys it. To be that story's teller, a designer has to keep changing with the times — only a design born that way can move people.” A brand's story is, in the end, the story of how people connect with the world around them.

Looking at the 50 eye-catching packages Dieline picked, we tried to set them against the site's forecasts and summaries from the past two years and against the packaging news of the past year, and to pull out some shared threads. Here is what these packages use, what subjects they reach for, and how they tell brand stories and hook into our lives.

Recyclable materials are the big trend, and no longer just kraft paper bags

“Plastic” could be called one of the defining words of 2018, along with “eco-friendly” and “energy-saving.” The Royal Statistical Society's International Statistic of the Year for 2018 was 90.5% — the share of the world's plastic waste that has never been recycled — a number that set off worry about the environment everywhere. As David Spiegelhalter, who oversaw the pick, put it, “this is a huge, growing, and real global problem.” On April 22, 2018, Earth Day's theme was “End Plastic Pollution.”

Governments and companies both made big moves in response over the past year. In April 2018 the British prime minister announced a plan to ban plastic straws and cotton swabs by 2019, to cut the plastic waste dumped into the ocean and the harm it does to sea life. In July 2018, Starbucks decided to phase out disposable plastic straws within two years, replacing them with biodegradable straws or strawless lids, and put $10 million into developing a recyclable cup. That same month, Adidas said it planned to replace all the plastic in its shoes and apparel with recycled polyester — that is, recycled plastic waste — by 2024.

In packaging design, kraft paper bags were the new trend two years ago, and that too was about the environment. In 2018 new ways to make packaging from recyclable material appeared, edible packaging among them. KFC's Hong Kong stores put out an edible wrapper for its Double Down burger, printed with the line “If I can't stop, I'll eat it down to the last scrap of wrapper.” In Italy, Simone Caronni and two other designers soaked and dried the potato peel left over from making fries and turned it into packaging for French fries.

Among Dieline's 50 best was “The Paper Bottle”, a project started by the Swedish pulp maker BillerudKorsnäs with other design and technology firms: a paper bottle that can be produced for a range of products, mainly to hold carbonated drinks.

Beyond the fully biodegradable pulp, the shape was designed to be general-purpose, good-looking and easy to mass-produce, so that more brands would use it and it could better replace the plastic bottle. The simple texture on the bottle imitates spruce and pine, the trees the pulp comes from. Whatever drink is inside, that branch pattern gives the buyer a quiet reminder about protecting the environment.

Cannabis packaging is turning varied and inventive

2018 was a year when the call for marijuana legalization grew louder. In January, California became the sixth US state to legalize marijuana; in October, Canada legalized recreational marijuana; in November, Thailand proposed considering legal medical marijuana.

The market has expanded with it. Figures the research firm Grand View Research released in 2018 put the global legal marijuana market at $146.4 billion by the end of 2025. Plenty of brands have already started thinking about how to work cannabis into their products.

Food and drink felt it first. In September 2018, Coca-Cola held talks with the Canadian cannabis producer Aurora and said it might launch a drink containing cannabidiol (CBD). This extract calms and soothes; it is not the intoxicating tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Beauty and skincare began adding cannabis too — Estée Lauder's Origins brand worked with Sephora on a CBD sheet mask called “Hello Calms.”

More cannabis in products naturally means changes in packaging, enough that Dieline's annual trend forecasts for both 2018 and 2019 mentioned cannabis and the calming CBD. In 2018, cannabis packaging began to pull away from “addiction” and “death,” and fresh, upmarket designs started to appear.

Among the 50 best of 2018, the packaging for Bloom Farms' vape product “Highlighter Plus” shows how cannabis is being stripped of stigma and given a designer's care. The company holds to making safe cannabis products, hoping to clear away prejudice against marijuana and put its benefits for a healthy life to work. The vape packaging comes in black, white and gray; a cut-out Bloom Farm cannabis leaf takes up half the box, with the product name set in plain black and white type. The whole package says: this will be a quality experience.

Nature, plants and animals are in favor, and pink-and-green pairings keep multiplying

Flowers, grasses, animals and other natural things are more and more welcome on packaging, and it is common to see leaves and petals filling a whole package. The tendency showed up before 2018. Remember the limited-edition Pepsi for Shanghai Fashion Week in 2017? The bottle's base color was the then-fashionable “millennial pink,” with blue and green banana and palm leaves for a tropical feel.

Gardeners and plant lovers really are getting younger. The National Gardening Survey published in 2018 found that 77% of Americans like growing plants at home, more than at any time before; the share of older people held steady, and the group growing was 18-to-34-year-olds. The lifestyle magazine Nylon has explained why: American millennials own homes at the lowest rate of any adult age group, so renting in a city that isn't their hometown has become the norm. Lonely, with little access to nature, they grow plants to heal themselves.

Fashionable colors say the same thing. The color forecaster Pantone made Greenery its 2017 Color of the Year, for “renewal and flourishing,” with a healing effect. Not long ago Pantone announced its 2019 color, “Living Coral,” taken from the endangered coral of the sea. Part of the point was a call to protect the environment, but more than that it was to let people “build an intimate connection with nature and with what is real.”

The good packaging of 2018 carried on with natural motifs, in part because products themselves now like to sell on “pure nature.” The British coffee company Botanical Coffee Co. sells “botanical plant coffee,” and its packaging pairs plain pink and green, with a marble texture on the side of the paper bag and around the lip of the can.

The London restaurant and food shop Panzer's Deli & Grocery has a new brand identity built on the texture and color of its most famous product, salmon, set against green.

Chocolate comes from a plant, so its packaging takes to nature easily, but the GLI AFFINATI line from the Italian brand SABADì may push the love of botanicals to its limit. The series is built on “aroma”: every box of chocolate is stored with a plant — tobacco, tea, pine resin and so on — so that the fat in the chocolate takes up the plant's smell and holds it.

The packaging is a plain tin box with gold lettering, and each box holds a small card drawn with the flower, leaf or fruit of the plant inside. SABADì calls itself a “slow living” brand and makes all sorts of “natural,” “organic” sweets and chocolate. In this brand's design, enjoying life and thinking about it means staying tied to nature.

Comics and illustration still tell the story best, and a series makes people want the whole set

If packaging design is storytelling, then next to symbols and words, comics and illustration tell it far more directly, and are the quickest way to give a product a “personality.” Brands teaming up with illustrators has become a standard pairing in packaging design, a trend QDaily has written about before.

Looking over the best packaging of 2018, we noticed some new uses for illustration. Beyond looking good, the illustration's subject matters. If it is stating the product's own qualities, the best treatment is playful and fun. If it wanders off the product to a subject of its own and gives the product new meaning, then the subject has to catch attention — and fit the product, which counts just as much. Once a design has those qualities, illustrations that run as a series across a product line can make people want to collect every one.

One “fun” example is the packaging for the Danish snack brand “Sea Man Seaweed Chips.” The product is a chip made with seaweed, in three flavors — black pepper squid, chili lobster and sea salt — a bit healthier than the usual chip. The illustration is simple: an ink-black squid, an orange lobster, green seaweed, and a fisherman with a cigarette in his mouth swimming in with a pair of scissors, apparently about to harvest the weed. Because the colors are so close, the chips sit among these figures without a seam — the squid and lobster look like they are eating chips, and the sea-salt chips sway like seaweed. Playful.

The Chinese pastry brand Yi Feng Qing Su made the list too. It comes from Xiamen, in Fujian, and sells pineapple cakes, pine-cone pastries, nougat and other snacks. It has a shop in Zengcuo'an, a fishing village in Xiamen that has become known in recent years for its craft and design stores. The pine-cone pastries come in four flavors, and the illustrations show the village through the four seasons, with flat blocks of color and small animals for a fresh, breezy feel. The brand has always sold itself on local character and tourism, with a line that runs, “Store everything that happened to you in Xiamen in one box of pastries.”

Chocolate brands have always liked illustration, and this year was no different. CACAO 70, from Montreal, wanted every bar to have a character of its own, so the front of its brightly colored packaging carries a drawing of a person and the back tells that person's story.

Several flavors from the Brazilian chocolate brand vivo are tied to a specialty from some other country — “Moroccan almond,” “Thai coconut,” “Japanese yuzu.” So the illustration on each package is a landmark from that country: a mosque for Morocco, Mount Fuji for Japan.

Custom type is becoming the lead player, usually with high-contrast color

Besides pictures, the other common way to tell a story is with words. But writing an essay on a package is probably a bad idea, so brands have started working on the type instead. This year, on top of inventing typefaces, quite a few stripped the pictures out of their packaging and logos and let the letters play the part alone, for something plain and fast to read.

The New York Times published a piece in April 2018 arguing that “typography is becoming increasingly important to corporate marketing — it has become a new form of communication.” Dieline also put type on its list of 2019 packaging trends, because “the type is the logo, the type is the brand.”

When a brand changes or reinvents its type, the questions people usually raise are these. Will longtime customers still recognize it once the typeface has changed or the picture has gone? In the internet age, is the new face legible on a phone? And does what the type conveys — friendly, lively, spooky, retro — actually match the product, and does it say so precisely?

Take the Nobel Prize, which redid its visual identity in December 2018. To cut down the elements and unify the look across its various institutions, the gold portrait of Alfred Nobel used for years gave way to sans-serif letters. Letters filling the whole field might be monotonous, so the designers also produced a set of striking colors — gold, green and others — so the letters could work in different settings. Some think this minimalist design does reach the original goals of “unity, less-is-more, timelessness”; critics think an award this classic and this cultural should not chase simplicity the way a fast-moving consumer brand does, and that Nobel's portrait should have stayed.

Type in the lead plus high-contrast color became a common pairing in 2018 packaging design. To stand in for a picture the type has to shine, with bright color in support. The Canadian ice cream brand nora´s tried exactly that: the packaging is mostly the white word “nora´s,” in a short, round face where the tail of the “n” stretches out and the r and a lock together, catching the soft, shiftable quality of ice cream. Depending on the flavor, the package is pink, yellow, green or blue, all bright, all suggesting the strawberry, peanut or mint inside.

Skincare packaging from the Indian e-commerce brand Happily Unmarried also uses prominent type and bright color. It prints its lines in that type right on the bottle, meaning to “talk to India's urban women” as the so-called happily unmarried woman. Most of the lines tell the user to value herself, and against those colors they land straight. Among them: “Hey good-looking,” “Either turn off the AC or apply this lotion,” “Believe in the power of a good body wash,” “I'm your type.”

The package becomes a canvas, and strong color and artwork stay popular

Slogans and logos both step back and the packaging itself is the art — which happens to match the spirit Dieline was founded on. The site spotted this trend at the start of 2018, saying “packaging will become a canvas.” A year on, plenty of brands have followed the rule.

In type-led packaging, striking color already does a lot of the work. In “canvas packaging” the words are usually set in the plainest face and stay as quiet as the logo, which leaves color to do nearly everything. So the colors and patterns here have to be beautiful, hard to miss, and combined in a way that means something.

A holiday package from the Australian skincare brand MECCA looks like a saturated watercolor; it was designed by the local Aboriginal artist Claudia Moodoonuthi. She grew up in the bush on an island, and has long been good at this loose, vivid style shaped by Aboriginal culture. This one is no exception — in an interview with Dieline she made a point of the color, saying the colors of sky and earth were what she noticed most often growing up in the bush. On the package they suit the holidays well.

Another brand using color on the package to stand for nature is Natural Science Beauty, from Oregon, which sells handmade, organic skincare made from plants. The packaging is white and light gray with cloud-shaped patches of color. The designer says each of these gentle combinations stands for a particular scene: sunrise on a beach, say, or a conifer forest with clean air.

Packaging that shows customization, and grows with the individual

From food and skincare to clothes, plenty of products now sell on “customization,” gathering data about the buyer to offer something more particular, more private — a product that seems to know the user better than the user does.

In December 2018, Procter & Gamble launched an online hair-type test in North America, recommending the right hair-care products to different people. L'Oréal put out a “Custom Dose” personalized skincare service in March, along with custom-mixed foundation through Lancôme and a 3D hair-color program that lets people try shades before they decide.

The basis for products like these is of course a strong database and the technology to customize, but if the customization shows up on the package as well, the buyer should feel all the more that the thing was made for her. Some customization is looser than hair color or dress size — a criterion like a star sign, handled well, can still make a buyer feel singular and let the product speak for her traits.

Among the 50 best of 2018, “Identité,” a skincare and cosmetics concept from the British design firm Seymourpowell, is about collecting user data to customize beauty products that change with the user — “smart beauty,” though today's technology cannot yet deliver it. Through a phone app the user supplies, a week ahead, her location, her schedule and her diet, and an AI uses that to provide the coming week's skincare and makeup: sunscreen for a beach trip, makeup remover for after a party. Each day's products sit in a disposable module tray, which may feel a little like taking medicine on schedule to look after yourself. Every module is a different shade of the same color family, and together they make a handsome set; since the packaging is disposable, the modules are made from biodegradable material.

An example of the looser sort of custom packaging is Delicata, the classic Dutch chocolate brand. It sorts its products into four categories aimed at four kinds of chocolate eater — everyday, enthusiast, adventurous and purist — then designs sharply different packaging for each. The first, “everyday delight,” is the liveliest, its letters upside down and floating against bright color; the second, “enthusiast delight,” is more careful, printed on handmade paper with a thicker feel and cut-paper patterns that show the hand; the fourth, “pure happiness,” fits its brief best, with solid-color wrapping paper, a marble texture and a gold logo and lettering — refined at a glance.

Minimal and gender-neutral design still can't be ignored — it is still how “high-end” is said

“Elegant” and “high-end” stopped meaning ornate and lavish long ago; minimalism and “less is more” now say refinement. QDaily has noted before that black is considered the color with the most luxury in it, and that top brands like black for shaking off any hint of cheapness; black and white together are popular too. Both colors state things plainly.

Besides black, white and quiet solid colors, minimalist packaging also shows up as very few patterns, large empty areas and a simple sans-serif mark. One more point, made in Dieline's 2018 forecast: the elements we associate with one gender or the other are thinning out, and packaging that leans neutral and more open is defining a new sense of “quality.”

The packaging for Elanveda, a beauty and wellness brand in California, takes the minimal route; its products are mostly plant essential oils and hair and cleansing products. The bottles that hold liquid or capsules are ordinary in shape, made of deep purple glass that protects what is inside; the labels are plain colored paper printed with the basic information in different sizes and faces, laid out simply and clearly. The “Elanveda” mark is embossed on the bottle, very quiet. Some packaging comes in bright red and green, but each color is tied to the plant the product was drawn from, so nothing jumps or dazzles.

Another minimalist example is the packaging for the American health-drink brand Muse + Mettā, which sells natural drinks made from plants and fruit. The bottom of the bottle is colored, everything above it a uniform brown, and the white label that dominates carries a simple mark.

Regional motifs are popular, and packaging shows off local flavor and culture

Regional culture matters more and more in a globalized setting. Multinationals trying to open a local market have given us plenty of examples of regional motifs worked into the product and its packaging, and this is where understanding of a tradition and skill at speaking across cultures get measured. Local brands play the same game, and like the multinationals they want these motifs to please people inside the region and outside it.

Take Chinese New Year. For the 2018 lunar new year, McDonald's released a limited-edition “Lucky Red Envelope for the Year of the Dog” in the United States, printed with lanterns, paper cuttings and other standard Chinese festival symbols, plus Asian dog breeds like the pug and the shiba. Nongfu Spring puts out a set of packaging each new year themed to that year's zodiac animal, and the 2018 “Golden Dog Bottle” was drawn with a Chinese country dog.

The Chinese New Year packaging that made Dieline's 50 came from Pepsi: a limited edition for China, and limited-edition Pepsi and 7Up for Malaysia. The Chinese bottle carries a simple gold line drawing of a dog's head, with the outlines of flowers and old coins, gold Chinese characters and the Pepsi logo. There are four dogs in all, gathered together on a box shaped like a doghouse.

Chinese New Year is a big holiday in Malaysia as well. The limited-edition Pepsi bottle is mostly red and gold, with lanterns, flowers and gold ingots; the 7Up can carries fish, lotus flowers and lotus leaves, which go well with 7Up's own green.

The other package with regional character that Dieline picked is Bahroma, a new ice cream brand from the Tajik ice cream company Food One. It set the new line's territory as Central Asia, Russia and Europe, aiming to make an “Eastern dessert.” The text on the package is framed by the dome of a mosque, alongside other typically Asian motifs. Given where it will sell, the designer wanted Eastern buyers to recognize themselves in these patterns and Western buyers to see the product's Eastern character at a glance.

Cover image: GLI AFFINATI aroma chocolates, image from SABADì. Long cover image: “The Paper Bottle”, image from thedieline.com. Banner: the new packaging for the restaurant and food shop Panzer's Deli & Grocery, image from thedieline.com.