In this session, we were joined by the super talented Lisa Jacobs, a designer focused on branding and conceptual design. Whilst Lisa still has a soft spot for digital illustration, her daily work for many global brands on branding and re-branding is where her experience shines. This is why there is no better person we can think of to talk us through the art and science behind great packaging design.

During this session, Lisa used pre-made graphics, illustrations, and patterns to show us how to enrich packaging design and add strategy to our product designs.

Enhance your packaging strategy with the super talented Lisa Jacobs, a designer focused on branding and conceptual design. Learn how to use premade graphics, illustrations, and patterns to enrich packaging design and add strategy to your product designs.

Create the Design

For this tutorial, Lisa used a scene creator to create a box and bottle packaging combination.

When you start product packaging, it's vital to keep its consistency. At the same time, your product design needs to stand out and not look like any other product. So a balance between consistency and being distinctive is important. 

For example, when you walk into a supermarket, you see a bunch of products that are similar. They’re consistent in their design and packaging for the product but distinctive in nature, making them stand out for the customer to buy the right product. 

Start by replacing the bottle and packaging as per your customisation and scale it up. 

Create a Logo

Use the Graphic Goods pack to create your logo. It has great elements and graphics to make the packaging design easy. For this, switch to Illustrator and select the flower packs, then select a flower. Set the kerning to 200 and choose the Marygold font type to name the brand ‘POLINE’. Create outlines for consistency at 25 pixels. 

Design the Packaging

Start with a clean base, color it black and copy your logo onto that. Pick the Birch Cherry Illustration from Graphic Goods and paste it onto the base, creating a letterpress effect. Color the illustration black and choose the Bevel and Emboss in settings and play around until you like the structure of the design. Then place your design on the packaging box and change the lighting as required. Use the contrast of the botanical illustration to stand out on the packaging. Adding a pop of teal green color, make it high in contrast and add sharp edges.  

For this particular design, the color and the illustration in the background are the variables. The rest of the components will have the same structure so that it can be expandable and versatile for different products. 

Pro tip: Understanding constants and variables is important. For example, the Apple packaging products have a front face of the product on the packaging. On one side, they have the Apple logo and the Apple name or the product name on the other side. They have this consistency on every product. 

Design the Product

Take the measurements of the bottle and copy & paste the elements on the packaging to design the bottle. Create contrast with the bottle by coloring it teal green. Now, take all the elements and color them black. Make sure to align all the elements as per the measurement of the bottle. 

This creates a good contrast between the bottle and the box. So when anybody opens the packaging it comes as a delight with the product popping out. 

Voila, it’s done. You have successfully created a beautiful design for your product and packaging.Â