Packaging Design Innovation: Balance of Structure and Appearance

What kind of packaging is good? A good package is a reasonable package, not just a beautiful package. Good packaging should meet the following requirements: First, good packaging must have a reasonable structure, packaging structure is to provide product protection performance and the appearance of the shape of the fundamental; Second, good packaging packaging materials should be reasonable, not only to provide the packaged goods The necessary protective properties, but also easy to process and meet environmental requirements; Third, good packaging should have an attractive design and pattern. In addition, there are three very important points: one is the acceptability of packaging costs; the other is a certain degree of anti-counterfeiting performance; and the third is the correlation with the company's brand and other products and with the marketing activities.

Good packaging design program

Good packaging can never be a product of whim, which has nothing to do with the designer's inspiration in the design process. Good packaging must be closely related to the company’s positioning of products and target markets, and closely related to the supporting advertising and market behavior. Good packaging is not the designer's personal behavior but the wisdom of a group of people. To achieve a good packaging design, you need to form a packaging design team, the team members should mainly come from the following aspects: the company's market staff, packaging structure design engineers, packaging production engineers, graphic designers and so on. Before starting the design, the team members should fully exchange opinions. The designer must carefully understand the user's intentions, target market, sales environment, product history, brand and characteristics, etc.; the design should fully consider the achievability and advancement of processing. As far as possible, the latest processing technology and materials are applied to the design. The opinion of the packaging production engineer should be given full attention from the beginning of the design. Before designing, we must fully understand the relevant laws and regulations. Before designing the packaging for mass production and placing on the market, it is advisable to conduct trial delivery first, collect feedback from the market, modify the packaging design, and put it on the market after being satisfied.

Problems in China's Packaging Design

In the past two decades, China's packaging design has made great progress. Every year, China has a number of packaging to win the World Star Award. If you count and analyze the world stars that have been won over the years, China's number of awards will be among the best. However, this does not mean that China's packaging design has reached a very high level. In fact, there are many misunderstandings in China's packaging design, and there are also many problems in the domestic packaging appraisal.

The first is that China's packaging design is heavy and light. Most of China's packaging design is the individual behavior of graphic designers alone. Most of these graphic designers are from fine arts, lack understanding of packaging structure and materials, and even lack some common-sense knowledge. Many award-winning packaging products are also very unreasonable.

Packaging in the industrial era must meet the needs of industrial production. Its basic feature is reproducibility, which can be repeated on a large scale. This type of production must maintain tolerances within the allowable range. Ceramic bottles have long been used as wine packaging containers, but from a modern production process point of view, it is very inappropriate, the bottle mouth size is difficult to maintain a consistent, when the bottle seal from the past mud into a modern aluminum cover, plastic cover The problem becomes very serious. There are also some designs that emphasize the use of natural materials such as bamboo and wood in order to emphasize nationality and regionality. However, in reality, these materials are difficult to meet the requirements of industrial production. Designs are either discarded after awards are awarded, or they are of little value. Excess coat;

Secondly, packaging is extravagant, and in order to pursue the exquisite appearance, a large number of unnecessary decorations are used, such as gold foil printing, multicolor printing, and the like. China's tobacco, alcohol, and even ice cream can be said to be the world's most extravagant packaging. Some ice cream bags use as many as nine colors of printing, it is not necessary; Third, China's various types of packaging evaluation, few technical experts Participation is also rarely rewarded for structural innovation. This has contributed to the partiality of China's packaging design from another aspect.

In contrast, in the packaging design of developed countries, many award-winning works are the crystallization of the most advanced production technology at that time, with little or no flat decoration design, such as the online molding and potting plastic bottles of Swiss Romiglge and crown cans designed to be cup-shaped. Cans, as well as in-mold labeling, etc., have all received packaging design awards. In Europe and the United States, the packaging design itself emphasizes not the graphic design, but the new technology, even if it is some traditional packaging, but also because of the different ideas and refreshing, such as Jean Paul perfume use tin cans for packaging; An award-winning design actually uses aluminum cans as a gift for ballpoint pens.

Comparing the packaging design awards of Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, India, China and other countries in recent years, it can be found that the current status is that packaging design in developed countries generally develops in terms of simplicity, environmental protection, and structural innovation; Wandering in the direction of fancy.

China's packaging design industry needs to reflect on what is good packaging, so that packaging design is the source of green packaging, rather than the company's tools to earn illegitimate wealth.

Author: Liu Baolong

Reprinted from: Good Packaging Network