People are visual creatures by nature. What differentiates a bad company from a good company is the fact that the latter knows how to attract customers’ attention with the help of packaging design. While an interesting and eye-catching logo does play a big part in marketing a product, nothing comes as close as the effects a visually appealing and striking design has on prospective customers.
Why is it So Important?
Customers are drawn, more than anything, to products that look good. Something that is well designed and interesting is bound to attract more potential customers than a product that is poorly designed and looks bland. This is the importance of packaging design. It is, after all, the key part in marketing a product and ensuring it sells. It is also the key part in associating a brand to a certain thing – be it a color or a font. What that means, essentially, is that customers that are drawn to a package are bound to remember it later down the road before coming back to the product.
Packaging Design: Where it Begins
A good design should always reflect the product and the creativity and personality of the company. There is more, however, to packaging design than simply ensuring a package looks appealing. There is a whole science behind it – from the shape of the package to the materials used without forgetting of course its functionality. For example, of the many things to take into consideration when creating a package, one of the most important things to remember is certainly the protection it offers to the product. There is no point in making a package look visually interesting if it is unable to do what it was intended to do in the first place.
How to Make the Perfect Packaging Design
Many research studies have been done on the importance of packaging design, and if there is something they all have found, it is that simplicity sells. What people want, more than anything, is to get the information in a quick and simple way. Though it starts by attracting their attention through the means of elegant and eye-catching packaging, clearly labeling what the product is about is of the utmost importance. Companies want people to buy their products – they do not want people to walk away and buy a competing product merely because the information can be accessed more quickly on their package.
What Customers Want
Other than simplicity, customers also want honesty and authenticity. In other words, they want to know for a fact that the product that is labelled on the packaging is clearly the product that can be found inside. For that to happen, companies should always ensure the package makes them look trustworthy. This can be achieved by making sure the package is made of the highest quality materials available. Good packaging should also reflect the personality of the company. If a company is green and modern, then the packaging should be recyclable and innovative.
There is no denying the fact that a logo plays a vital part when it comes to marketing, but the power a visually appealing package has on customers cannot be compared to it. Customers want to associate a product with something positive, and the packaging design is often the first thing that comes to their mind.
CHARACTERSTICS OF PACKAGING DESIGNER
Good design makes a product useful – A product is bought to be used. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from its usefulness.
Good Design is Innovative – Innovation does not only imply something new, it also means product refinement. Good design usually comes from resourceful and creative people who take inventions and perfect them. In 1779, Samuel Crompton of Lancashire invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet the innovation was continued by Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling who created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive.
Good Design Makes a Product Understandable – Good design emphasizes simplicity and clarifies the product’s structure and use. At best, it is self-explanatory and intuitive. No one likes things that are tricky to operate. Good design typically provides a high quality user manual, instructions, or user interface.
Good Design is Aesthetic – The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our well-being. Objects of beauty generate feelings of delight and pleasure, but only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good Design Makes Products Easy to Transport, Store, and Maintain – Good design reduces or eliminates tedious drudgery associated with the maintenance of a product (i.e., the cleaning of the object is designed to be quick and easy). Good design packages a product in a way that is small, stackable, standardized, easy to load on a truck or train and therefore easy to transport.
Good Design is Long-Lasting – Unlike fashionable design, products with good design are built to last many years. Planned obsolescence is when a product or part is made that is designed to fail, or become less desirable over time or after a certain amount of use. Our culture is trending toward a throwaway society based on over-consumption and excessive production of short-lived or disposable items. Non-durable goods (products used less than three years) make up 27% of all municipal solid waste, with durable goods making up 16%. Economic growth built on made-to-break products, planned obsolescence, and fashion is wasteful.
Good Design is Environmentally Friendly – The population is 7 billion, and we’re expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050. The planet is naturally able to absorb and cleanse a certain amount of pollution, but with this many people on the earth, we risk environmental degradation. Good design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. Products that take into account the environment are easy to recycle, made sustainably, and use materials with optimal properties. Architects are now designing buildings and communities using green architecture techniques. Architects and designers need to take a leadership role in designing buildings and communities that encourage the cultural change required to restore environmental sustainability. Poor design is responsible for many, if not most, of our environmental problems. Good design minimizes a product’s packaging; containers and packaging now represent 32% of all municipal solid waste.
Good Design is Less Design – Less is more. Good design is well-edited, concentrating only on the essentials. Truly great products are sleek, essential and easy to use. There’s an honesty in good design–it does not try to make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer.
Good Design is Thorough, Down to the Last Detail – Nothing is arbitrary. Care and accuracy in the design process shows respect towards the consumer.
While there are many forms of sustainable packaging, understanding what it is, how it is used and what makes it better for humans and the planet than conventional packaging is the first step to wider use.
While green packaging, which is also known as sustainable packaging, are commonly known terms in use today, a significant number of people struggle with their meaning. Green packaging is the use of manufacturing methods and materials for packaging of goods that has low impact on the environment and energy consumption. In other words, sustainable packaging uses environmentally-sensitive methods, including energy efficiency, recyclable and biodegradable materials, down-gauging, reusability and much more.
The importance of green packaging to humans and our environment is incalculable. A great deal of energy is used in the production of traditional packaging such as plastics, corrugated boxes, plastic bags, and other packaging. Most often, the source of that energy is fossil fuels that add millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere per year while discarded conventional packaging ends up in landfills or oceans causing soil, water, and plant contamination.
By using sustainable packaging, manufacturers and consumers can eliminate these contaminants that destroy the atmosphere, soil and water of our planet. This can be done via use of lowering packaging content, creation of recyclable or biodegradable packaging, and use of alternative energy means such as wind, solar and biofuels in the production and transport of the packaging.
Plastics made from polyethylene are among the most widely used packaging today and among the greatest threat to our environment. Increasingly, manufacturers are utilizing recycled, recyclable and minimalist packaging wherever appropriate. Biodegradable plastics are also in use with mixes of plant-based plastics that replace some or most of the non-renewable petroleum or fossil-based resources used in conventional PET plastic (A type of plastic resin widely used in plastic bottles).
Today’s plastic bags from an increasing number of manufacturers are meeting the sustainable packaging threshold with use of Post-Consumer Recycled Polyethylene (PCR PE), which are plastics made from the consumer stream of waste such as bottles, caps and recycled plastic bags collected in commercial and residential recycling programs. Additives are used by some manufacturers to make the plastic bag biodegradable so that it breaks down over a shorter time when disposed of in a landfill.
When it comes to cardboard packaging, major manufacturers are creating corrugated cardboard from 100-percent postconsumer recycled fiber or virgin mixed with recycled fiber to create corrugated cardboard that is also completely recyclable and biodegradable. Many more are reducing or even eliminating the amount of corrugated cardboard they use in packaging, replacing it with foam blocks at corners and bands around the product. The foam is lighter than the corrugate and reduces shipping costs and damage that can occur during loading/unloading and transportation.
There is even sustainable packaging in the areas where molded packaging is used such as egg carton containers and consumer product packaging. The use of 100-percent recycled newspaper, which is mixed into a slurry with water, and vacuum-formed on screened molds creates molded fiber packaging that is resilient and strong enough to compete with most vacuum-formed plastic, expanded polystyrene (EPS), and corrugated designs. The used product has a high recyclability factor and significantly cuts the energy consumption needs in the production over conventional packaging.
This is really only a primer on green packaging and the materials and uses that make it sustainable packaging. As more Americans increase their understanding of the importance of sustainable packaging and more manufacturers increase their use, we can ensure a future with clean water, air, and soil for all.
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