Willow: The Sustainable Package Design
Follow along with my final project here!
You can find my research here!
SUSTAINABILITY AROUND PACKAGE DESIGN
While there is substantial guidance around design for the environment in general, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition identified a need to consolidate the thinking, the information, and the best practices for packaging. First of all, sustainable development is defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Since then, individuals and governments have been working to give this definition practical meaning in the real world.
The integration of physical design, material selection, and end-of-life considerations into an effective design process will help you minimize the negative impacts while at the same time, optimizing the positive benefits of your design solutions. In other words, you can satisfy your creative ambitions and be environmentally responsible at the same time. The design of packaging influences the entire packaging supply chain, from material sourcing to material recovery. By understanding relationships within the flow of packaging materials, designers can identify strategic partners who can help them work through problems along the way to design sustainable packaging.
THE PROBLEM I WANT TO SOLVE
This is the reason I want to create designs for sustainable packaging. It’s the only way to reduce the use of plastic, lighten the load on the environment, and get rid of old, boring looks. My mission is to design beautiful packaging that uses only sustainable materials. I want to help out the land we live on and help save it before it gets worse. I wanted to tackle two problems at once and create something that is useful, effective, and eye-catching.
The package design content I create will achieve the following goals:
Conducting initial research that will allow me to understand how to strive for the goals I set for myself
Creating three different personas with three different needs so that I can create different types of packaging for each one.
Choosing sustainable packaging options that can be designed as well as non-harmful to our environment.
Create package designs that meet the needs of three users that will be created
Creating mockups of final designs to present to peers as well as those outside the classroom
PERSONAS
The first step before creating the content for the package design was to create my personas. I need to understand who I am designing for before I can actually create anything. I need to understand their motivations and what drives them to choose sustainable packaging. This allows me to understand what choices to make in the design thinking process.
These personas would include the three users that I create. I tried to choose three very different users, with three different goals in mind. In order to do this, I chose three types of people who would get custom package designs on sustainable materials. I created a little backstory on them and explained why they would stumble upon a brand like this and why they would want to use it. I then wrote down some of their personality traits, needs, frustrations, and something they would say. This gives me the necessary information to understand what they want and need and allows me to create designs that are curated towards them.
DIELINES & INITIAL SKETCHES
My next step was to create dielines. Using a dieline, I can create my sketches and know where to put them on the packaging, and how big they need to be. A dieline is used in graphic design as a placeholder for assisting in the proper layout of a document that will be diecut as part of the finishing process.
It allows me to understand where to place my designs and how big, small, or spread apart to make them. The solid lines are the trim marks, dotted lines are the fold marks, and diagonal repeating lines are the glue areas.
Once I create my dielines, I can begin my sketches and place my designs where I want to include them. When creating these sketches, It’s important to know that people subconsciously respond to visual stimuli: this is called marketing psychology, which attempts to understand the way that consumers think, feel, reason, and make decisions. The goal of marketing is to convince people that taking a calculated emotional appeal can be just what you need to land a lasting customer.
PACKAGE DESIGNS
Now that I have my sketches, I can go into choosing color palettes, making comps of my designs, and putting them onto a mockup. With my sketches, the first thing I do is recreate them in Illustrator. This way I have graphics that I can use that are clean, smooth, and neat. I then come up with a color palette. This way each package design can stand out with the color that is used. Once I have my graphics and my colors, I can start placing them onto the dielines that I created in the last step. Now that I have my design comp and know what my final product looks like, I can take it and put it onto a mockup. A mockup is a full-size model of a design or device, used for product presentations or other purposes. This way, I can really see as well as show off what my design would look like on an actual product.
For my first package design, I focused on my user, Rubi Rogers. Rubi has her own Etsy shop and sells jewelry. I decided to design a small, cloth jewelry bag and a pillow box. The materials will include cotton and cardboard. All these materials and the ones I will be using are sustainable in the sense that they are either reusable or recyclable.
The second package design focuses on Gary Filmore who sells his own coffee beans. For this one, I designed a slide-out box to put the coffee bean bags in. This would use cardboard.
The last package design focuses on Elijah Johnson’s company that sells sustainable cleaning products. I ended up designing a glass spray bottle, a label made of seed paper, and a diagonal box made of cardboard. Seed paper is a special eco-friendly paper made from post-consumer materials embedded with wildflower, herb, or vegetable seeds.
CONCLUSION
After doing the preliminary research and understanding what went into package design and choosing sustainable materials for packaging, I really was able to find a sense of direction for where I wanted to go in this project. I wanted to create something that was aesthetically pleasing and also something that would be practical in today’s world, which is using sustainable materials. This project was a huge learning process and I was able to learn vital information along the way.