Packaging Design

Successful Product Branding From Concept to Shelf

Marianne R. Klimchuk, Sandra A. Krasovec

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118358542
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

The fully updated single-source guide to creating successful packaging designs for consumer products

Now in full-color throughout, Packaging Design, Second Edition has been fully updated to secure its place as the most comprehensive resource of professional information for creating packaging designs that serve as the marketing vehicles for consumer products. Packed with practical guidance, step-by-step descriptions of the creative process, and all-important insights into the varying perspectives of the stakeholders, the design phases, and the production process, this book illuminates the business of packaging design like no other.

Whether you're a designer, brand manager, or packaging manufacturer, the highly visual coverage in Packaging Design will be useful to you, as well as everyone else involved in the process of marketing consumer products. To address the most current packaging design objectives, this new edition offers:

• Fully updated coverage (35 percent new or updated) of the entire packaging design process, including the business of packaging design, terminology, design principles, the creative process, and pre-production and production issues
• A new chapter that puts packaging design in the context of brand and business strategies
• A new chapter on social responsibility and sustainability
• All new case studies and examples that illustrate every phase of the packaging design process
• A history of packaging design covered in brief to provide a context and framework for today's business
• Useful appendices on portfolio preparation for the student and the professional, along with general legal and regulatory issues and professional practice guidelines

Chapter 1
The History

Humans have needed to gather, collect, store, transport, and preserve goods since time immemorial. Following is a brief exploration of how the advancements of civilizations, the growth of trade between peoples, technological inventions, and countless other historical events facilitated the evolution of what we have come to call packaging design.

From as early as the Stone Age, containers were fashioned from woven grasses and fibers, bark, leaves, shells, clay pottery, and crude glassware. These materials were used for holding goods—food, drink, clothing, and tools—for everyday use (fig. 1.1). Archaeologists’ discovery of such objects shows that early economies depended on packaging for sharing and transporting goods. As various peoples transitioned from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agricultural production, demand was created for goods that were only produced in specific places. Trade in such goods was the forerunner to modern market economies (fig. 1.2).

The Sumerians, among the earliest of settled societies, dating back over five thousand years, developed a written communication system, initially consisting of a system of pictographs that enabled new forms of visual identification. With the Sumerian practice of year-round agriculture came a surplus of storable food, and pictographs served to identify these stored products (fig. 1.3). The Phoenician civilization inherited Sumerian writing and further developed it, creating the single-sound symbols—an alphabet—that became the foundation for the further evolution of Western written languages. Thus Sumerian pictographs evolved into the syllabic symbols that became the basis for the forms of written communication used by many cultures for almost two thousand years.

These early symbol systems developed from the need to establish identity in three ways: personal (who is it?), ownership (who possesses it?), and origin (who made it?). Such symbols were the forerunners of trademarks and brand identities. The Greeks took the letters of the Phoenician alphabet and turned them into beautiful art forms, standardizing each with component vertical and horizontal strokes based on geometric constructions. This marked the beginning of letterform design (fig. 1.4).

Scrolls made from papyrus (a wetland plant) and dried reeds and parchment made from specially prepared animal pelts were among the first portable writing surfaces. The Chinese emperor Ho-di of the Han dynasty produced papers in approximately 105 BCE. Researchers have discovered that the Western Han dynasty used these materials not only for writing but also for wallpaper, toilet paper, napkins—and wrapping used for packaging. Chinese papermaking techniques advanced over the next fifteen hundred years, reaching the Middle East and then spreading across Europe.

Fig. 1.1
Neolithic jar.

Fig. 1.2
Pictographics, naos of the temple at Ed Dakka, Egypt.
Close examination of the image of an interior temple wall reveals the visual identification of goods by pictorial representation.

Fig. 1.3
Symbol for wheat.
The Sumerian symbol for wheat is one of the earliest examples of an icon used for visual communication.

Fig. 1.4
Early letterforms.

The Growth of Trade

As people made their way around the world, goods were transported greater distances and so there was a need for vessels to carry these goods. Certain commodities are particularly identified with trade across great distances: perfumes, spices, wine, precious metals and textiles, and, later, coffee and tea. Merchants, missionaries, nomads, and soldiers traded such goods along early intercontinental trade routes linking Europe and Asia, the Silk Road being the most notable. Crusaders traded along routes between Europe and the Middle East. Such activity created the need for a wide variety of packaging to contain, protect, identify, and distinguish products along the way.

Hollow gourds and animal bladders were the precursors of glass bottles, and animal skins and leaves were the forerunners of paper bags and plastic wrap. Skilled artisans handcrafted ceramic bottles, jars, urns, containers, and other decorative receptacles to house incense, perfume, and ointments, as well as beer and wine (fig. 1.5).

In the twelfth and thirteen centuries, an identifiable merchant class, concerned with moving products from one locale to another, began to appear. Buying and selling goods, as opposed to farming or crafting material necessities, thus became a way to make a living.

Along with the merchant classes came an interest in the wider world a...