Play With Your Food
Packaging Prototypes
Branding and sustainable packaging prototypes for kitchen supplies. (Completed for Graphics 2 studio class. March-May 2023.)
Project Brief
For this student project, I created branding and sustainable packaging prototypes for two objects representing the concepts of “ritual and repair”. The packages were to be part of the same brand and each include the brand logo and name, a name for the object, a short description of the product, and a bar code.
What I Created
In response to “ritual and repair”, I chose to focus on the act of play, any activity that, as author Kristin Wong sums up well in a 2020 article for the New York Times, “is something that’s imaginative, self-directed, intrinsically motivated, and guided by rules that leave room for creativity”. When done regularly, play is tied to improved mental health and wellbeing, so it fits the bill both for ritual and repair. For me, an important form of play is cooking. So, I created packaging prototypes for what are effectively my favorite toys, a spatula and a kitchen knife, for a brand I called Play With Your Food.
The three core values of Play With Your Food are playfulness, quality, and sustainability. The fun colors, somersaulting fork logo, and whimsical product names channel creativity and inspire action – play with your food, mix it up, break it down – encouraging play. Quality comes through in the anticipation and tactile experience. By showing an image of the product rather than the product itself, the packaging provides a sense of anticipation, which is rewarded with a satisfying “pop” when the tube is opened to reveal the blue interior and product within. Finally, the packaging is made primarily of unbleached and uncoated recycled paper and is completely recyclable, though is of sturdy enough construction that it can be repurposed around the house.
Takeaways
This project taught me the basics of packaging design. While most of the work I’ve done so far focuses on the visual and auditory aspects of a brand, this project provided an introduction into the tactile aspects of a brand – texture, weight, opening and closing mechanism, sound, etc. – and how they contribute to the identity.
Process work
Creating a Theme
I started with the brand identity for this project. I struggled initially to answer the very abstract prompt of “ritual and repair”. So, I turned to some of my driving tenets as a designer for inspiration, one of which is creating experiences that inspire play. Upon brainstorming objects I had in my apartment that I used for play, the idea occurred to me upon making dinner that cooking is a kind of play I regularly engage in and legitimately enjoy. From there, I decided to package kitchen tools and began ideating for a kitchen supply brand.
Sketching
I began ideating by walking through a grocery store and looking at food packaging for inspiration. With this project, I decided I wanted to challenge myself to come up with a textural style, departing from the usual vector-graphics look working in Illustrator encourages, so I took note of packages with illustrations or more interesting textures and typesetting. Then, I began sketching ingredients and tools as well as hand-drawing out logotypes featuring words and phrases you hear around a kitchen, eventually arriving at “play with your food”. Since we’re so often instructed to do the contrary, I felt it would bring some levity to the brand.
Creating an Identity
I decided to create packaging that was predominantly covered in illustrations, making something eye-catching and playful. Each package depicts ingredients with which the tool within might be used: you’d use a knife to filet a fish or chop a pepper, while you’d use a spatula to fry an egg or sauté shrimp.
I selected blue as the primary identity color because it would stand out against the recycled kraft paper packaging, letting the non-food tools pop off the collage of ingredients behind them.
I designed somersaulting fork logo as I played with drawing an identifiable kitchen tool in a playful and unexpected way. I was unsatisfied with some smiley face sketches I’d created with the fork as the mouth, so I decided to give the fork some personality.
