Great standount and stripped back messaging always works, right? Take a look at this example from OHMG. The naming strategy is very clever for a magnesium based drink – once you know that’s what it is… And that’s the problem. Whilst it may achieve standout, it’s not immediately evident what the product is, what flavour it is or what the benefit is to the consumer. Now some of you out there may say, but it encourages me to pick it up and have a look at it. But would be you actually want to pick everything up and examine it in the middle of a busy shop? Being single minded and stripping back clu ..read more

Now, at first glance this might this looks like one of those thingies that you pop in your toilet cistern in order to get rid of limescale and make the water blue. It’s actually a gizmo for filtering tap water. For these types of consumables it’s imperative to communicate the end use and benefit to the consumer. However, the ‘thirst quenching refreshment’ story and how many bottles one filter creates information is pretty much nowhere to be seen. Sure, consumers no what Britta does as a brand, but lifestyle and end benefit are hugely important to the end of consumer. In a world where sustainab ..read more

What do you see first? Is it the Apple, the background texture or the brand logo? Now, bear in mind this photo is taken fairly close up on the shelf, but take a couple of steps back and the brand name disappears entirely. The brand name should work effectively from a metre and a half away as your approach shelf and also when you’re right up next to it. This is even more important if you don’t have an instantly recognisable brand colour or other piece of sign posting to draw the eye. Build equity, not confusion. #BrandDesign, #PackagingDesign, #Packaging, #Marketing The post Buil ..read more

Is it just me? It would appear that the health and safety people have taken over control of SRP creation at the moment. I’m sure I remember the oxo SRP being a much shallow tray to allow the O and X to rule the shelf. This slightly overcautious iteration seems to spoil this champion of on shelf presence. Can anyone else remember a shallower tray, or is this one of those “Mandala effect” things happening? #BrandDesign, #PackagingDesign, #Packaging, #Marketing The post Is it just me? appeared first on Slice Design | Branding and Packaging Design Agency ..read more

Pet food, as I’ve discussed before is a very confusing area. Brands have a very small canvas to communicate a lot of information, especially that your four-legged friend is going to love the taste and that it’s packed with stuff that is going do them good! Because of this challenge, you are relying on the imagery and colour palette to do much of the communication and delivery of this information to the purchaser! I came across this own brand offering from Sainsbury’s on my first thought was, ‘wow, that’s so bleak!’. Deconstructing the pack: There is a black tombstone holding all the informatio ..read more

Packaging aimed at specific occasions has a lot of heavy lifting to do. One of the key needs it has to meet, is to provide a strong visual shortcut to the emotion of that event. Take birthdays and baking specifically. Who doesn’t like a good birthday cake? How many of us end up uttering ‘Oh go on then, I shouldn’t, but just one more slice!’ The excitement of that yearly ritual of celebration and over indulgence always seems to be missed from these products. Packaging aimed at specific occasions should always have emotion at the heart of its brand storytelling. Granted, these are own brand offe ..read more

Size isn’t everything. Just because something is large on pack doesn’t mean that it will be the first thing that I seen. Here is a great example of that on Supermalt. The brand-name takes up the largest part of the canvas and is made even bigger by being on an angle. This increase in real estate isn’t enough to make it punch out because it utilises some of the background colours in the body of the logo type. So whilst the volume of the brand logo increases, the impact at fixture doesn’t. Creating impact is all about utilising a foreground, a mid-ground and a background. The foreground, which u ..read more

An egg, is an egg, is an egg. Isn’t it? Trying to differentiate one egg offering from another is a notoriously difficult task. With the price of most basic eggs, shooting up in recent months, it will be fair for any consumer to think that all eggs have suddenly gone, proper premium! It used to be that they were either free range, or not. A fairly simple choice, but this little upstart really caught my eye. It’s pitched as the egg with ‘gorgeous yolks for foodie folks’. The structure is quite a move away from typical eggbox cartons and the pack Graphics feature both foils AND spot varnishes. Op ..read more

Coke are relaunching the original lemon flavour after being discontinued back in 2006. Interestingly, here they have opted for a background vignette from red to yellow which moves away from the usual solid background flavour signalling across the portfolio. This new design also features an illustration of a fizzing lemon. The first thing to note here is that they’re moving away from an architecture that has already been established. In my opinion, this undermines this pack architecture and creates more of a ‘differentiated’ offering rather than a flavour extension. The addition of the fizzing ..read more

Play was a built-in feature to many snack and confectionary brands aimed kids when I was growing up. You only have to think about Sherbet Dib-Dabs, Whistle lollies, and those really strange lipstick sweets that turned your mouth blue! It’s fair to say this has been lost in recent years, so it was nice to see that, nostalgic snack classic, Golden Wonder create a range of Transformers snacks that you can build, or transform into a crispy version of the real thing! Well, almost! Both my kids, who are probably far too old now to be playing with this sort of stuff found this captivating and immedia ..read more