Packaging design

Packaging design is in practice three separate decisions: material and structure, graphics, and mandatory information. A packaging engineer or the printer draws the structure, a designer handles the graphics, somebody on your side owns the legal copy. The order never changes. First you know the print run and the process, then you draw. Reverse it and you get a beautiful proposal nobody can afford at your volume.

On a shelf you have a fraction of attention. People do not study packaging, they rule it out or they do not. A small syrup producer brought us a label with a big logo, a big product name and a big promise. When everything is big, nothing is. We picked one element readable from two metres and made the rest serve it. Note the date too: from 12 August 2026 the European PPWR regulation brings new rules on recyclability, labelling and documentation.

Allow six to ten weeks from brief to print files, half of it for approvals and samples. From you we need dimensions and material from the printer, the expected run, the mandatory copy, and the product physically in hand. Always ask for a proof on the final substrate. A colour on screen and the same colour on uncoated board are two different colours, and finding that out on a finished pallet is expensive.

Where money gets wasted: gold foiling and spot varnish on a small run. They add more to the unit price than the entire design spread across the series. And here is what a designer would rather not say. Handsome packaging design will not rescue a product that is not selling. If people are not buying, the problem is usually price or placement, not the box.

Every proposal of ours gets printed on an office printer, stuck onto a real bottle or box and stood on a table between three competing products. Then we call in somebody from the office who knows nothing about the project and ask from two metres what it is. Ten minutes. Try it with your own pack today, before the files go to the printer.