EP#17 - What’s in a box? The magical world of packaging and how it can make all the difference.

Who should be listening to this? If you’re thinking about selling a physical product then these tips and tid bits should help you out?What is the point of packaging? Two aspects - to protect the product in transit and to present the product nicely on arrival. To give those tingly Apple unboxing moments. Two parts to packaging design. Artwork and hardware so we’re going to go through them separately:Hardware: the actual folded card. This is produced using something called a net, and this a flat file. Imagine unfolding a cardboard box, well draw a chalk line around it and there’s your net. Most is done using adobe illustrator. If you’re stuck for ideas around a type of packaging to go for or don’t want to design your own, have a look on alibaba and just type in your product name and packaging and there should be some good examples. Card comes in different weights. Artwork:this is your opportunity to stand out. You want your product packaging to define your brand and for it all to tie in neatly with one another. Pinterest is your best friend here. Most brand and creative work is just reprocessing amazing ideas you see on other products and packaging for your brand. It’s loads of fun and can get some amazing results. Colour palettes - again using pinterest to define your core colours and then use a website called coolors.com to pull out matching colourways to define your brand palette. This is essential for making sure the packaging and eventually the product images and packaging all looks like it’s from the same company. File layout - when you’re sending a custom file to a supplier it will be on the same illustrator file on different layers, on layer one will be the die-cut, which will stamp the card out, then layer 2 will be the artwork itself, then layer three will be the fold lines - usually denoted by dashed lines, and then layer 5 is additional instructions like spot UV or maybe you want some gold embossing to get a bit of fancy details. Instructions & inserts - this usually done either on illustrator or using in design. Our packaging supplier can print from a pdf.  Make sure you order samples! Very important for packaging. Typical prices for packaging.Links

https://coolors.co/