AND MORE...

I need to decide what my target customer is, this obviously varies to what kind of product box I want to design..

Cereal:
Something like bran flakes would appeal to a healthy adult, male or female, the packaging is simply telling the buyer the nutritional information, shows a picture of the actual product and is usually a very grown up simple design...
Then there is the opposite...A cereal for kids, always a very bright colourful design with a lot going on. Usually with some kind of cartoon character and in some cases a free toy.

Cosmetics:
Make up is obviously aimed at females. It can vary dramatically though in the brands target audiences... There is very cheap make up for younger girls and young teenagers, very cheap, very girly, very pink! It can be very clean and organic (like a face cream box design) this would be aimed at an older female who just wants a simple face cream, this kind of packaging is what tghe brand Clinique uses, they have a huge range of creams, serums etc and they are all in very similar packaging, it is very much a brand design rather than individual products. Their packaging seems very clean, exactly what they want their product to come across as, it uses very soft pastel colours and small type.
A lot of cosmetics are sold by the packaging it sits in... Most expensive cosmetic packaging is very sleek, it makes the product look like more than it really is.

Chocolate boxes:
Again this can vary a lot...A child would be attracted to a big Christmas variety box where as an adult would rather something smaller and better quality. There can also be big campaigns aimed specifically at different genders, for example the chocolate Yorkie is designed for men...Their one liner is 'Not for girls', a big, bulky chocolate for a big man! Hilarious really! But this is a huge trademark for Yorkie now.

Toys:
This is obviously mainly aimed at children, similar sort of designs to kids cereal boxes, a big brightly coloured box, showing the child all the amazing toys inside! But toys can also be packaged differently when aimed at adults to buy for children, what may seem like a boring design to a child can make an adult think what a well made, good quality toy for their child to play with...

So basically the categories are:
- Small children
- Young girls
- Young boys
- Teenage girls
- Teenage boys
- Parents
- Adults buying for children
- Teenagers
- Women in groups of 18-30, 30-45, 45-60, 60-80
- Men in the same groups

I need to decide what kind of product box I want to design and before I start find a target group.

PACKAGING RESEARCH...

In this project I need to create a type of box packaging, here I will research different types of box packaging...

- Cereal boxes
- Washing powder boxes
- Cosmetic boxes
- Toiletries boxes
- Medicine boxes
- Chocolate boxes
- Cleaning product boxes
- Gift boxes - Perfume boxes
- Drinks packaging (Eg; Champagne)
- Food packaging (Eg; Frozen foods, rice, cake mix etc)
- Toy boxes
- Video game/console boxes

...The list goes on and on...

Above is a cereal box design for 'Sugar Smacks'. This was a popular cereal in the 1980s aimed at children. The design for this changed many times, this change was usually dependent on the free gift in the box. The design above works really well, the colours and the star like shape around the image would bring your eyes straight to this box on a shelf. The type is very bold and simple, the customer can see exactly what the product is called and who it is made by straight away. This particular design would definitely appeal to kids, it comes across almost as a toy box, the whole design is aimed at people who would buy the product just for the free toy! Although this design is from the 80s and can seem quite dated to some people I think if this was back in the shops today people would buy it just for the design!




Cosmetic products don't tend to use box packaging that often especially cheaper high street brands, but many more expensive brands are starting to contain there products in boxes. It makes the product seem 'special', some cosmetic brands rely on there packaging to make the product sell. Above you can see the box and the product that is contained in it...If this lipgloss was sold on its own without the box it would probably be sold at lower price, the box brings a lot more 'class' to the product.
Bars of soap sold individually don't tend to have a box packaging but the image above is a multipack. It is a very simple design for a very simple product. The product name just says '3 Unscented Bars of Soap' the product brand is called 'Body True' the brand, product name and packaging all fit together very well. The packaging is very sort of 'organic' with a nice rough texture. It doesn't seem to have much information on it, but it has all you really need, it shows that you don't have to have lots of description and images if you clearly tell the customer what the product is.... 3 Unscented Bars of Soap.....What else do you really need to know?!
The box above is for Pepto-Bismol, a medicine. The product itself is pink so they have incorporated this onto the design, with an image of the product itself in the bottom right hand corner. The product name is very large with the version smaller underneath, I like how they have put this in a letter 'P' it really stands out and makes it more interesting than just a blank colour across the box. On the front is tells you simply what the product does along with a little diagram, it c;ear;y states what flavour it is with an image of some cherries which matches the colour scheme, then shows you an actual image of what the product inside looks like.
The design above is for Cadbury's Roses. The brand and product is so well know it doesn't really need much else on the box. The design has been the same (or similar) for many years now and is instantly recognisable. It has the colour purple in the design which relates to the Cadbury brand, all the text on the front is the brand name and product name. On the back of the box will have a separate description for each individual chocolate, which is a lot more detailed than the front.
Above is a cleaning product box design for Brillo. This design is like above as it has hardly changed in years and years. It is a very simple design which works, the colours and type are very bold and it has a short basic description of what the product is. Of course this product was probably helped a great deal with Andy Warhol's work on the design in his own work.
Retail shops are starting to offer gift packaging a lot more nowadays. Like makeup this started for more expensive, designer brands but is now branching out to high street brands like Gap and American Apparel. This is a great idea for presents, especially around Christmas and other holiday periods. They are usually very simple with just the brands name on like the above one for Chanel. There are very few perfumes that do not come in some kind of box whether this is individually or in a gift set like the one above. Perfume boxes are usually very simple and sleek with most of the detail on the perfume bottle itself. I would say that people are more drawn to the product by how the bottle looks rather than the box, the bottles are always in view in stores for testing the perfume.


Some bottles of wine and champagne are packaged in boxes, this is a great idea and I don't know why more companies don't do it! Everyone buys wine as a gift for someone, why not make it look more like on in a nice box?! It also makes the product look a lot more expensive! Simple but very effective.


Various types of food is packaged in boxes like the above, they normally have a large picture of the product on the front and in some cases like this one (cake mix) will have simple instructions on the back. The image in the one above shows you a perfect finished version of the product, it has been sliced and placed with berries to make the product seem more appertising than just a big slab of cake on its own, which is what of course you will get once you have made the cake. This normally would have 'Serving suggestion' next to the image, this allows the brand to show more than just the actual product.
Most toys for children are packaged in boxes, normally for kids the theory is the bigger the box the better the toy! Toy packaging is usually very bright and eye catching and will vary in colour schemes depending on if the product is aimed at boys or girls, for example dolls are normally in pink packaging or a toy boat would maybe be blue for boys, this happens a lot more in packaging for babies (gift packaging etc pink for girls, blue for boys). Toy packaging will usually have what age it is suitable for in bright bold type, this is because if buying a gift for a child that is one of the first things your going to think of... Is this to difficult? Will they swallow parts of this toy? etc...

PACKAGING YOURSELF

Brief

In this assignment you will use vectors to create an illustration of an original product box with graphically designed packaging, such as a soap box, cornflake box, washing powder box etc, substituting your name for the product name.

You will research the context of your design before you begin the design process.

You will use a range of Adobe illustrator techniques and processes to make the image of the box in a three dimensional space, then you will rework and resave your file into other sizes and formats for various forms of output.

Research package product design and graphic design.

Research the use of flat colours and gradients in this kind of design. Choose one or two product designs and focus on the way they work. Investigate and itemise the colours of different elements in the design and their relationship to one another. Create sets of swatches which work in similar ways to the colours of the design you are looking at.

Make particular study of the typographic elements:

How are the faces arranged and separated by function in the design?

Which colours are repeated and how does the work of the coloured typefaces differ from that of the black printed text?

How is the logo strengthened in typographic and graphic design?

How many distinct font faces and weights are used?

Create a box with your name as the brand

Create a comparative brand identity to the design you have studied. Do not exactly replicate this design but generate a new one which works in a similar way and adopts similar values and formulations. You should mimic the parts and functions of the packaging designs you have researched e.g. appropriate strap line, product details, serials, bar coding etc but not exactly replicate them in their particular, unique, forms.

Build a scaled down version of the package you have researched. Create six individual faces for the six sides of the box, then create a 3D representation of your package. Create a backdrop with a blended shadow to present the 3D representation of the box.

Use a range of Illustrator techniques to create the designs for your box sides, including: blends, appearances, masking, outlining, transforming, pathfinder filters, clipping groups, filters, effects and styles

Save all versions of working files and produce a folder of six finished flat sides in .AI and PDF formats. The PDFs should be print friendly, i.e. high quality A4 PDF files.

In the end...

I have finished all 3 panorama's! I have learned a ridiculous amount of skills during this project. I hardly new how to use Photoshop before and slowly throughout this project I have been picking skills up, I now feel so much more confident with all the practice!
Its taken a lot of work especially as I had to take 5 panorama's! I am really pleased with the overall project though, maybe not so much with the garden QTVR but I love the other two...

I would love to try this again in the future, maybe just the panoramas, I think they would look great printed....although a tad expensive.

THE MAKING...

To begin with I needed to get hold of a tripod, stand in my location (A garden, a flat and a train carriage) and take photographs all around me, slowing turning the tripod so each image will be overlapped...

I then had to put them in order in Photoshop, making each image a different layer, and line them up roughly. This was made easier by dropping the opacity on the layer you move, so you can align objects shown through the layer underneath...

I then went through each layer and added an adjustment layer, mainly to adjust the brightness and contrast to match with the next image...

I was then left with a line wherever a new layer begun, although it helped a great deal playing with the brightness I then had to add a layer mask. A layer mask allows you to mask out parts of a layer and reveal the layer underneath, you can blend them together until you no longer see a line...Blending took me a long time on all 3 images, sometimes I masked to much a layer away and had to start again, you have to be very gentle and soft with it.

I then had to flatten the image, find a sensible point in the panorama which I could cut and match up easily (eg. something like a plain white wall) Make a selection to where I want to split it, make that selection a layer and make the other half a layer the swap them round so the ends were now in the middle. This is where I found a lot of problems...

With two of my images (garden and train) the ends didn't match up at all. As I was turning the tripod it was slowly moving down as I went (as happened with two other images I had to discard) this meant that I had to crop quite a lot out of the image and also a lot of playing around with the ends (mainly warping as shown in a previous post) But, in the garden panorama I made a selection and copied it into a new layer on top (see below)
I then had to warp this layer so that the lines matched up and with a bit a blending it was starting to look better. Although this part was the hardest of the whole project and I'm still really not happy with it.

When I was happy with the images, I saved a jpeg and I had to use a program called Sticher to convert the panorama to a working QTVR, this was a very quick and simple exercise and there I had my QTVR!

My theme and location...

I have chosen the theme 'Alone', Originally I wanted to do a kind of 'Hide and seek' type thing, almost the opposite of 'Wheres Wally', but I feel it will be a lot more interesting with a person obviously in it without trying to find them. So I have picked 'Alone', it will be a lot easier than having a crowd in the picture and more to look at than having no one...

My 3 locations are; Alone in the living room, Alone in the Garden and Alone traveling...

My other two were outside in a playground and a landscape sitting by a lake but unfortunately these didn't work (As shown a couple of posts ago)

The only Panorama that I haven't had a problem with is the Living Room one, the other two I have still had problems lining up the ends because of Parallax...

I have had to use warping for this (see below)

QTVR Research

QTVR's are used for many different types of companies such as; schools/colleges/universities, property sites, health clubs/gyms, tourism, events, hospitals/health care and other public amenities. They are all very useful to go on websites for the above list, it allows the viewer to take a virtual tour before they visit the site in person... Here are some examples...
College
Property
Events
Health Club
Tourism

QTVR's are becoming more and more popular with the web everyday. There are even some agencies who only specialize in the making of QTVR's
QTVR.DK
EYE REVOLUTION

The same sort of thing happened with this Landscape Panorama. Its a real shame as this one could have looked the best :( I think its was the grass I was taking it on, although there was a spirit level in the tripod...so who knows?!

I ended up giving up on it...The 3 photo's I have ended up using are all on solid flat ground which in the future I will definitely try and stick too!

Progress...

So... I ended up having to take 5 Panoramic Photographs... Some of them have either not lined up (Due to Tripod) Or are just to complicated! Like the one below of the Playground...
I didn't think about this one properly, the railings would just take so much time, which I wouldn't have minded if the photos hadn't started to slope.

As you can see below the ends are completely different which obviously means the whole image is sloping from the start (Parallax), this would have taken a lot of
warping!