Your logo is the starting point to building your brand identity not the end result. The logo mark, colours and typography are just the initial layers of the visual brand. But, without a consistent manifestation in all points of contact your brand design will never reach full maturity and proficiency in communication with your customers.
This includes your packaging and the first visual experience customers have with a product as it makes its way from business to buyer. There is an increasing number of businesses turning to printed boxes wholesale UK to make just that first impression. If you align your packaging with your identity and design ethos completely, your customers will stop recognising the packaging and only experience your brand.
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The Gap Between Logo and Experience
Packaging is a huge part of brand identity. So why do designers stop at designing the identity and have the materials printed in the most cost effective way possible? Where is the consideration for implementation, for detail, for special touches that express the brand? What’s the point of creating beautiful, custom identity guidelines if the boxes they come in are not treated with the same care and attention? And what does it say about the brand when that beautiful, custom-designed identity materials package arrives in a plain brown box?
One of the biggest risks a brand can take is to suffer from the gap between the identity you have designed out and the experience that actual customers receive. This invisible divide can be felt by customers even when they can’t quite put their finger on it. This feeling or impression may not be expressible in words, but it is there nonetheless. A brand that felt ultra premium and considered online can suddenly feel mundane at the moment when it matters most — when you are delivering the product to the customer at the peak of their emotional investment in the brand.
Packaging is often marginalised, operating in a sizeable and noticeable gap. This exists between the packaging function and the brand identity function, with packaging often operating in this space, trying to bridge the two. By addressing the gap we can work to shift the way packaging is conceptualised from a purely logistical exercise, post brand identity development, to being integral to brand design from the very beginning. Packaging could be treated as a brand design element alongside the logo, the colour palette, and the typography.
Packaging as Three-Dimensional Brand Expression
Logos are two-dimensional, packaging is three-dimensional, and as such, it offers a number of brand expression opportunities that purely graphic design do not. The weight, finish and structure of packaging, the sound it makes when it is opened and the way it feels in one’s hands all play a significant role in how a product and brand are perceived.
A brand that communicates a message of premium quality will use heavier weight, higher quality board to reinforce this message. A brand which conveys a message of natural and sustainable values will use uncoated kraft textures and materials which feel honest and unprocessed to the consumer. A brand which sells creative products will push the packaging beyond standard structural forms to communicate their creative DNA and to surprise the consumer with a packaging solution that they haven’t come across before. These physical elements of brand communication engage a customer’s senses in a way that no digital solution can, regardless of the technical sophistication of the visual output and create a multisensory brand experience.
Packages themselves tell stories the packaging design couldn’t tell in flat form. From the first open of a lid or a box, the act of unpacking tells a brand story to the customer in a series of tangible interactions that are far more emotive and memorable than flat design can provide.
Typography and Colour in Three Dimensions
When applying the typographic and colour decisions in the brand identity guidelines to physical packaging, there are certain idiosyncrasies that need to be understood to ensure that packaging truly extends brand identity rather than simply transferring the brand identity onto a new format.
Because packaging materials display colour differently than digital media, packaging designers make colour choices based on the actual packaging material, taking into account colour performance on various substrates, coatings and printing processes. This can make what one packaging designer considers to be the brand colour appear differently than what another designer would expect from viewing digital applications online, printed business materials or product packaging prototypes. Packaging designers with practical experience know to think of colour in the context of the final packaging and to select colours which are appropriate for the particular packaging application.
Whereas a logotype may read well at high resolution in publications such as wayfinding signage, or as large-scale graphics on packaging itself, the much reduced scale required for the package face itself poses unique typographic challenges. In contrast to other applications of your typeface, the range of reading angles and scales for packaging typography can be challenging to accurately anticipate without physical testing in its intended environment.
Tube Packaging as Brand Differentiation
When it comes to the structural packaging options open to a brand seeking physical expression and creativity beyond the standard rectangular box, a cylindrical format offers a host of unique possibilities. For those considering such packaging the benefits are obvious; in a world dominated by rectangular boxes, a brand working with tube packaging is creating an immediate point of difference in terms of the overall appearance in retail and through the pack — something to be appreciated before the design comes into play.
The cylindrical shape of a paper tube provides opportunities for certain brand expressions including continuous wrap-around graphics that treat the entire surface of the tube as one large graphic, clear exposure or reveals at the neck of the tube when a cap is removed, and associations with premium and high quality products whether spirits, cosmetics, art prints, architectural drawings, etc. Rectangular boxes cannot offer these associations even with the highest print quality or finishes.
In addition to delivering a number of aesthetic benefits, tube packaging can also deliver a number of logistically driven benefits that a creative package of rolled artwork, packaging for prints and designers’ visualisations through paperwork all embody. The packaging of such materials are a direct reflection of the high standards that many creative briefs embody and the brand promise around product protection. Categories such as luxury and premium benefit from premium, creative packaging solutions.
The Finishing Decisions That Elevate Brand Identity
It is on the surface finish of packaging that things move from the competent delivery of brand identity to incredible brand experience. That’s where the essence of the brand intent is translated into tangible physical experiences that customers and consumers can literally feel and sense for themselves, far surpassing what copywriting can deliver.
Finishing techniques that transform packaging into brand experience:
- Soft-touch lamination combined with high gloss delivers a uniquely tactile and luxurious experience for the recipient; a true first touch moment that conveys high-end branding values
- Spot UV coating gives glossy highlights to selected design features on a matte finish, providing contrast and enhancing specific brand features to give them a premium feel and raised tactile appeal
- Foil stamping in brand-aligned metallic colours throughout the catalogue provides a premium look and feel that clearly communicates to designers and clients that the brand is high-end and attentive to the smallest detail
- Embossing and debossing provide customers with packaging that has a tactile quality, allowing customers to feel raised or recessed design that flat printing cannot provide
- Die-cutting allows for structure and window cutouts to make distinctive brand shapes and take the visual identity to a three dimensional place
When choosing the most suitable print finishing technique, consideration should be given to how the finish complements the brand language, rather than opting for the print method that visually looks the most impressive. The most appropriate finishing approach is the one that extends existing brand language most authentically rather than the one that simply looks most impressive in isolation.
Consistency Across Packaging Formats
Most companies need packaging for multiple formats within their product line, for various shipping and uses, and for different markets and customer channels. Maintaining a company’s visual identity and brand message across these different packaging formats is likely the biggest packaging design challenge that a company faces.
Packaging formats are often approached as isolated design problems, leading to a fragmented presentation of a brand. On the other hand, consistently applying a visual language across e-commerce shipping boxes, retail packaging, tissue paper, labels, and packing tape offers the opportunity for cumulative brand impressions at every point of physical customer interaction. If packaging designs vary between formats, the potential of each one is squandered and fails to reinforce the brand identity existing in other formats.
Packaging consistency is achieved by creating packaging specific brand guidelines that extend the visual identity to three dimensional applications. These packaging guidelines would set out the following:
- The specific requirements for colour reproduction across packaging materials
- The use of typography in terms of size and placement for various package formats
- The finishing approach hierarchies to determine the appropriate techniques for different tiers of packaging
- The structural design guidelines that ensure the overall visual consistency of various packaging formats
When Packaging Becomes the Marketing
The most successful packaging innovation is when packaging becomes more than a cost of doing business; it becomes a marketing asset that generates returns. When packaging innovation is so tightly linked to brand identity that packaging itself stands out and generates recognition and desire, it goes beyond its traditional function to encase and protect products in the market.
Packaging that is fully integrated into the brand identity generates higher marketing returns as products are photographed and shared with customers on social media, products are given to recipients who are subjected to the brand identity prior to experiencing the product, and the unboxing experience elicits genuine emotional responses that paid advertising is unable to elicit. As a result, packaging offers one of the highest returns on investment for a business, provided the packaging experience completes the brand identity communicated by the logo and does not contradict it by introducing inconsistency or generic packaging that undermines the value of thoughtful brand design.
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