Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Hello!: Hi. My name is Beatrice Menis. I'm a branding and packaging designer based in Bristol. I run my own studio working with small businesses and startups. I've been lucky enough to work on a lot of different projects. From colorful popsicles to a Korean skincare line as well as chocolate protein bars and frozen smoothies. My goal on Skillshare is to create a mini-series of classes called The ABC OF PACKAGING to spread my knowledge and passion about packaging design to as many students as possible. Today's class is about an underdog in the packaging design world, the dreaded back of pack. So many designers and brands just forget about this funnel. It's full of mandatories such as bar codes, ingredients, and other legal information so it's boring but I don't see it that way. I see it as a challenge, is a perfect opportunity that could be used for recipes, tips, hidden surprises, and messages to inject some of the brand and product personality. For the class's project, we'll be taken an existing packaging design and redesign the back of pack together. For the purpose of this class, I took a packaging of rocket ice lollies. I chose a very generic supermarket brand and started redesigning it. I've redesigned all of the sides except the back of pack so we can design it together. Or you can choose any other packaging design you like. Could be something you're currently working on or simply a packaging that you think have a better back of pack as you'll be able to apply these principles on any design. This class is for designers at any level interested in packaging design, branding, storytelling, and love details. I'm super excited for you guys to join me in this class and start loving back of pack as much as I do. Let's get started. See you in class.
2. Today's Project: Welcome to this course, and thanks for enrolling. Let's go through exactly what you'll be creating in this class and what skills you're expecting to learn. We will be taking an existing packaging design and redesign the backoff pack together. You will need some basic Illustrator and Photoshop skills. But you don't need to be a pro, don't worry. This is how are we going to break down the project. First things first, we'll have a look at what packaging design is and most importantly, what backoff pack is and why it's so important. We will then have a look at a couple of successful backoff packs and pick them apart, seeing what you're doing right.This could also be a great source of inspiration for our project. I will briefly take you through the existing packaging and a few reasons and inspirations behind my redesign. We will also reconstruct the backoff pack to understand, what need to stay, what could be removed, and what could be added to make it more interesting. After analyzing it, it's time to sketch out a few different layouts and see how we can play around with information that needs to be included. It's time to start designing in Illustrator. I will show you how to set up an organized file before getting into our backoff pack redesign. I will also share a few tips and tricks that can be applied to any design that will instantly help you make it more fun and enjoyable. Last but not least, as a little extra, I will show you how to turn your flat panel into an engaging visual. We will use Photoshop to turn your back panel into a mock-up so you can share it with your client or simply showcasing in your portfolio in a more professional way. It's time to get started. See you in the next lesson.
3. What is Back of Pack?: What is back of pack? Let's take one step backwards and have a look at what packaging design is first. No worries, I'll keep it short and sweet. As I'm aware, most of you may already know all about it. Packaging is the science, art, and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Yes, it's a practical product, but it's of course, much more than that. It's a marketing tool that is used to communicate a brand or a product. A good packaging design should always tell a story, connect on an emotional level with potential consumers, making them loyal to the brand and ultimately buy the product. Moving on to the back of pack. It's a panel that contains all the necessary information for a product to be sold. These are the four elements that you will find in most back of packs. Product story, nutritional information, barcode, and content information. The product story is a creative story about the product which tells consumers the best ways to use or consume the product. It can include tips, recipes, and other ways of engaging with the products. The more creative and interesting the story will be, the more people will actually want to stop and read the back of pack. For example, if we have a look at the Innocent coconut milk, they've used illustrations to explain how the product can be used and added little fun extras to engage with the reader, such as a bathtub fulfilled with milk or a coconut with a sophisticated monocle. These are of course not necessary, but it's what ultimately will make the brand memorable and fun. Another great example is of course Oatly. I'm a big fan of Oatly's branding and packaging. The whole packaging, not just the back of pack tells a story. As you can see on this specific back of pack, they even call it the boring side. There's a little blurb about it that you can stop and read it, or if not you can just go and have a wonderful day. On these other examples, you can also see their overall tone of voice and illustrations are really casual and fun. These storytelling is what makes a product really engaging. Even oat milk. As I'm sure you can tell by now, I'm a little bit of a nerd when it comes to back of pack. It's also super hard to find good inspiration about this hidden panel. I've been collecting a Pinterest board 30 years with a lot of inspiration of cool back a packs, feel free to just join it and just gather some of the inspiration from there. Nutritional information is often displayed as a panel or a grid. It includes information on energy, saturates, carbohydrates, and so on. Next to it we'll also find the ingredients and the allergens. Depending on where your based, you'll have to follow different rules. For example, if you're based in the US, you will have to follow certain FDA regulations. If you're based in the UK, you will have to use a combination of color-coding called traffic lights to show the guns the nutritional value that's included in the product. Always make sure to double check your country regulations before making any design decision. As you can tell, this information is super important, talking about ingredients and allergens. Make sure to use stronger creativity to make some of these element really pop. Three is barcode. A barcode is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form, used especially for stock control. Once again, depending on what you're based, you'll find different types of barcodes. These are the two most common ones. We have UPC, which stands for universal product code, and EAN, which stands for European article number. No matter where you based, your always have to include a barcode in your back of pack, and in your packaging. Just make sure you're following some of the super important rules. The first rule will be, make sure you have enough contrast. If you don't have enough contrast with your background, they won't be able to scan your barcode and ultimately they won't be able to sell the product. Another super important rule is make sure you're always following the minimum size regulation. These are just some of the rules, but of course, there's many more and again, make sure you're checking with your country regulation for this as well. I'm completely aware these sounds super boring, but actually trust me, even barcodes could be fun. I've included some of the examples that you're seeing right now and additional ones where you can see that despite adding some hidden meanings even barcodes could actually be more interesting. Last but not least, contact information. Such as the company's website, phone number, addresses, and so on. As these information finally, doesn't require any legal formatting, feel free to have fun with it. Just make sure it stands out and really pops. These are some of the most common elements that you will find in your back of pack. But of course there's anymore, such as logos, certification, warnings, and so on. See you in the next lesson.
4. Analyze & Deconstruct: Let's have a look at the packaging design I chose for today's class. I pick some generic Rocket Ice Lollies. It's a simple and fun summer treat and it sparks so many childhood memories. This is how the current design looks like. It has a space steam linked to the rockets and handmade illustrations. I kept the same background color and of course space theme for cognisability, but added a modern and playful twist to it when redesigning it. My redesign was inspired by the Retro NASA badges and the colors are inspired by, of course, the flavors of the lollies. As you can see, I have redesigned all of the sides except the back of pack, so we can do it together. Now let's have a look at the current back of pack. As you can see, all of the side is filled with storing information and nutritional facts. We also have ingredients and allergy advice and symbols for recycling, all of this stuff is of course mandatory and super important to keep. On the right-hand side, we have the company's information, addresses, and website, and of course the bar-code. As you can see, the ingredients seem to be repeated on the top, and here on the side. There's not really any design element that links this back of pack to the other side of packaging, which makes it quite generic and boring. The only link that we could relate to the other sides is this blue tag that says V and 8 servings. We will have to keep the information we've just analyzed, but as you can see, there's a lot of white unused space, which means we can organize all the information in a better way, and on top of that, with all the remaining space, we can add any element that we think could make the back of pack more interesting and engaging. See you in the next lesson.
5. Let's Sketch Things up!: [MUSIC] Now that we have a clearer picture of what needs to stay in this back of pack and the extra space that can be used for additional information, we can start thinking of elements that we could add to make the product and the story more interesting. I always like to sketch up a couple of layout. Is just something that helps me visualize before jumping into Illustrator. First things first, I would write down the elements that I know I need to include. For example, in this case, the ingredients, the storing information, the allergens, the bar-code, the recycling symbol, company information, and of course, nutritional facts. Let's quickly draw our panel outline. Again, I can't stress enough this does not need to look fancy, is just for ourselves to have a better idea of what we need to translate into Illustrator later on. I think it'll be quite nice to include some of the boring, mandatory information on the bottom half of the pack. For this free design, I think I would like to have a link with one. I used to have these as a kid and I also think it can be nice to focus on the natural flavors of the spots and the ingredients. On the bottom here I'm just going to mark this up because this is where I'll have my nutritional information. Then next to it, I'm going to have my storing information and the recyclable icons. I think this information needs to sit altogether as it relates to each other. Next to it, we can have the company's information and website. To the far right, we can have the bar-code and I think it makes sense to add the grounds above the bar-code. By doing this, we have most of the mandatory information on the bottom half. We already have this top element here on the left, which I think is staying the same place. We could probably create a couple of blocks for the ingredients and other elements to add a touch of color as well. I'm going to have my ingredients here, my allergen information next to it, and the natural icon as well. Now, we have this remaining space where we can communicate about the childhood memories and the natural ingredients as well. I'm just going to go ahead and have a little blurb about how these are made with natural ingredients. It could be quite nice to create some illustrations for the flavors as well. I'm going to have a little icon of a pineapple, an orange, and a strawberry. I think we can create another tab like we have on the other side to frame the back of pack. In this little tab, I'm going to have an icon of a rocket lolly, and maybe I'm going to add something like launching new back in time to of course have a play with the fact that is a rocket and also to link it with the childhood memory. This is of course just a rough idea of what I'm going to illustrate, but you could illustrate whatever you like. For example, you could create a set of icons or illustrations about where it's best to consume the product, or you could talk about the outer space flavors of this lollies as well, is entirely up to you. Now, it's finally time to design in Illustrator. See you in the next lesson.
6. Setting up Our Illustrator File: Welcome to this class. This is a class when we're finally getting to design our back of pack. But before doing that, I just want to talk you through a few things that I always do in order to set up an organized file. It will help you design your packaging smoothly. On top of that, it will also set up your file to be more organized when it's going to print. You're saving yourself sometime at the end. One of my first steps would be workspaces. Most of you might already be aware of this, but workspaces, is something I wish I knew when I started designing. As you can see, your workspaces will be up here. I currently have two workspaces. One is called BMD, which is the one that I use for designing, and another one, it's called artwork, which is the one that I use for print proofing and has all the tools that helped me set up a file footprint. Usually, if you don't have any workspaces, you will have automatically one of these. When I use these, usually, you don't really have the animacy you want to use. What I would recommend doing is creating one of these. It's super easy. The first thing that you have to do is you have to open the tabs that you want to have, that you use the most. Once they're all set in the position and they're all in place, you just go here and click on "New Workspace". For the purpose of this class, I'm going to call this one Skillshare, and then just hit "Ok". Now, this is your Skillshare workspace. It will appear up here. It's super handy and I would definitely recommend looking into it. Now, let's look into the layers of our file. As you will see on the right hand side, I have five different layers. I like to be really organized here as it helps me throughout the whole designing process. I'm just going to go on and tick them all so I can walk you through all of them. The first one is called cutter and as the layer says, it's the cutter of my packaging. I always like to assign it as spot color called cutter as well. I won't go too much into detail, but by assigning a spot color, it helps me when I go into preparing the file for print. Then, we'll have another layer called folds. Here it is. As you can see, I've marked-up all the folds with dotted lines to indicate the actual folds. These as well, as you will see, have another spot color called folds. Then I have another layer called background. With my background, I always make sure to have a bleed. I will just quickly show you how you can get one really easily. If you go into your cutter, and you click this little button on the right, it will select everything that is in this layer. Just go ahead and click it. Make sure that all of these lines are joined up. This has to be a joined shape. Once you've done that, you can click on "Object", "Path", "Offset Path". What this would do is would offset the path how many millimeters you like. I recommend having at least three millimeters, but of course, it depends on the size of the actual artwork and the actual packaging. Hit "Ok". What this would do is it will create offset path of your cutter, which is going to become your background, which is what I've done here. You just drag it over to your background layer, and then just use it with a bleed. I can't stress enough how important a bleed is. You want to make sure you have some extra space outside of your cutter in case of any printing mismatch or any printing error. You don't want to accidentally have some white unwanted space. It's always good to have your background to be part of the bleed. But I have two other layers, one called graphics, and one called images. If we go ahead and click on the "Graphics Layer", I will have all of my texts here and my illustrations. Last but not least, I have another one called images, which in this case, has our ice lolly. If you can see here, when I hover onto my image, the transformation box is quite big, which means I can't really select the word "lollies". What I would do is I would always lock the folds, lock the cutter, the background and the images, because we don't really want to accidentally move any of those elements. Now, I can just work on my file and just don't move anything that I don't want to move. See you in the next lesson.
7. It's Time to Design!: Now that we've set up an organized file that we can work in, we can start designing the back of pack. What I'm going to be doing for this class, I'm just going to create a box here because we don't want to be designing vertically, and I'm also going to go ahead and create a new art board over here. I'm just going to take my box and turn it around, and I'm going to drop the color. If you're working on an actual packaging design, make sure you're always working in one-to-one scale for the purpose of the course. I'm just going to make this bigger so you can all see what I'm actually doing. The reason why you should keep one-to-one scale when you're designing is not just to actually see how the design will look like, but it's also to make sure you're controlling your type sizes and make sure you're meeting all the printing specs that you should be meeting. As you can see up here, this is a current back of pack of the ice lollies. There's a lot of empty space here and here, and elements like the ingredients are repeated twice. The first thing that I'm going to be doing, I am going to create my own swatches. I drop off the colors that I'm actually using in the pack. This is just a quick way of creating swatches up, I drop elements from one creating design, we also going to take this topography, which is cubano, and this other one, which is called boucherie. These are my main elements that create the branding of this pack so that I know what I'm working with. I'm just going to make sure this guy is in microns so I can lock it and these ones are in graphics. Everything is locked except the graphic layer. First things first, I'm just going to look at this tab, copy it. Just going to make it a little bit bigger, and I think it's really rounded, so I'm just going to create a new tab for it and maybe it could be made pink, it could be quite nice. I'm just going to send it to that. These two corners are still a little bit rounded. This is a great tool. When you click that corner, you have this layer of circle, so just pressing it and drag and you can adjust your corners to be rounded, which is great. I'm just going to take these elements and center them. I think it could be quite nice to make sure that this is cubano, so it matches the font we're using on the front of pack. I'm just going to be using futura for my back of pack, condense in this case, and make sure I'm centering everything. I think this green is quite murky, it doesn't really go with the palette we're going for, so I'm just going to go ahead and change it. I think I want it to be lighter, so I'm just going to make it a bit brighter and maybe not as yellow, so here we go. Now that we've created a tab, we need to add the essential information such as nutritional facts. Just going to copy paste them here. As I said, I'm going to be using futura. I'm just going to change this font to futura book, and these ones could be futura medium as well. We don't want to have black topography on blue. What we're going to do is select it and then select everything else. I'm going to show you one of my favorite tools ever, which is the Recolor Artwork. If you click on this wheel, you'll be able to see all of the colors in the artwork. This is super handy if you have two recolor network that has a lot of colors. For example, I'm just going to show you, you can pick the color groups you already have and everything will change accordingly, so it's really cool. In this case, we can be as fun because we need to make sure we're keeping the green and the orange because they're mandatory items, I'm just going to make sure this stay the same, but we can quickly replace all the black with white, just between that, which is really handy. We can just make sure this aligns here, and I'll just go ahead and adjust it. Make sure that whenever you can remove space and make the elements tighter as all of the pixel we'll gain now can be used for something a bit more fun and engaging. Now we have our nutritional facts down here. We want to be including the storage information as well. I'm just going to go ahead and do the same thing. What I want to be doing is I want to make my text white again, so I'm just going to use the same tool, but another good tool is, instead of using Pathfinder, I use this tool called Shape builder. If you click on it and if you press option, you can see you have a little minus and if you don't pass anything, you have a plus. In this case you want to knock this one out of this one, so you would hit minus and just click on it, and this is just now our shape. It's a quite a good tool to use instead of Pathfinder as you can control it a bit more. I'm just going to go ahead and change the font, and I'm also going to change the color of this. I'm just going to copy paste one that I've already modified. Here it is, it's using the same font that is using here. Again I've tried to align the elements as much as possible. As the next step, we're going to add the recyclable information. Again I want this black to be white and I think it could be quite nice to align maybe this to the text and to the bottom of this. Now we have all this information as well. Just going to go ahead and change it to futura, so we have consistency everywhere. We have most of our monitoring information on here now. The next thing that we'll be looking at is the barcode. I'm also going to soften the edges a little bit. I'm going to make sure it's grouped and it has his own space. Next, I'm going to add this information. This is the information that's how to contact the brand if anything happens and if you want to find out more. Here we go. I've just took this information and make sure it was the same font as everything else, and I've also used this bubbles. One thing that we can do as well is, you can see this bracket is black now, but we can actually make it blue, to make it a bit softer, and to again match the background color. What we're going to do next is we're going to take this information here and we're going to add it into our pack. Once again, I'm going to make sure I'm using futura. I'm just going to try and align things as much as they can, so I'm just going to make it white as well. Now we have the bottom half of the packaging with mandatory information, or at least most of the mandatory information. What we can do next is we have to include the ingredients that you repeated and also the allergy advice and flavorings, which are super important. What we could do, we can actually use boxes to highlight some of the information and also match the design that we have on the front of pack. I'm going to go ahead and create a box for the ingredients. I'm again going to just copy paste it and I'm also making sure that we have no hyphenation. To do that, just select all of your text, and here you should have paragraph, if this doesn't come up, just hit Command T, and then this will show up and go on paragraph and antique hyphenate, and we can make sure it's aligned here as well. What we can do next is we can add these two elements as well. I think it could be quite nice if we created two other boxes. Now we have our allergy information here and I think it really stands out more than it did before. I'm personally lactose intolerant, so I think it's super important for allergy information to really stand out, but this one, I think it's about ingredients being natural, socially green. Again, copy paste it from my file. We have some of our elements. I'm just going to use the same pink I've used here. I think we've added all of the information that was in the previous back of pack. You can see that just by organizing elements better, we have a lot of space that can be used for something more fun, something about the product or the brand. In this particular case, I thought it could be nice to talk about the fact that it's made from real juice. I'm just going to go ahead and create a little space for it. I'm just going to write, made with real fruit. I'm going to use cubano again, which is the main font we've used in the pack, and I'm going to make it yellow, just to make it a bit more fun. I'm also going to write from concentrate. I'm just going to take the font that I've parked here and just write from concentrate. I think since we're talking about natural factors, it can be nice, so I've added a little icon that illustrates that. I've created previously, so I'm just going to paste it in here. We still have some space, so I think it could be really nice to talk about the ingredients. We can illustrate three little icons for the three flavors of the pops, so pineapple, orange and strawberry. I thought since it's spaced theme, it would be quite nice to add objectives to the actual fruits that are related to space. These are the small touches that are storytelling. For example, pineapple, I'm just going to write that down. I think we could use something simple because obviously this is targeted to kids as well. I'm just going to go and write pineapple. Next one is orange. I think we could use out of space orange. I really like alliterations as well, so if we have the same towards starting with the same letter, it's quite interesting, makes it a little bit more honorable as well. Third one is strawberry, and I think this one can be quite cool if we had strawberry supernova. Again as I've done with the leaf, I've created icons for these three fruits, so I'm just going to copy paste them into it. At least we still have some space. I think it could be quite nice to just frame this boxes with the same top that we have on the other side, so we can just flip it. When I was talking about these rocket lollies, I was talking about being nostalgic and taking you back to childhood. I thought it could be quite nice to say something like launching you back in time. I've created a little illustration that I'm just going to paste in here. I think it's a nice touch and it's quite playful to add an illustration that's us launching you back in time, and then make sure everything is beautifully aligned. Here we have it. This is our new back of pack, we can compare the old one versus the new one, and we're using exactly the same information. We're just adopting it to a design that matches the rest of the sides. Then I'm going to copy this and just make sure everything is looking good. I think that we could just change the background color of the barcode. Be very careful when you're doing this. You always have to make sure you have enough contrast or the actual barcode to be scanned. If we did something like this, there's not enough contrast. What we can do in this case, we can just use yellow because it's quite light, so we don't have a white shape standing out. Here we have it. We have our 360 Design, and as you can see now the back of pack feels much more connected with the rest of the design. This is just one way of doing this back of pack. There's a 1,000 other ways these could have been done. Please make sure you're sharing your back of pack in the project group and I'm looking forward to see what you guys come up with. See you in the next lesson.
8. BONUS: Mockup in Photoshop: Welcome to this class. In this class we are going to be mocking up the design we've just created. As you can see here, I'm using a Photoshop Mockup. I saved this mock up in the project resources. Please feel free to download it and do it along with me. As you can see on the right-hand side, we have different groups. We have a group with a background. In this case, it has a grainy texture that you'll be able to see once we apply a color, we have a wall color, which it's that one and we also have a floor color, as you can see. Then we have two different groups and they correspond to the two different packagings. Last but not least, we have an overlay which has highlight and texture. Let's start with these packaging over here, which is this one. As you can see, I have smart objects. If you don't know what a smart object is, it's an element that you paste it into illustrator. By pasting it as a smart object is editable, which means you can just double-click on it, you will open in illustrator, you can make any changes, you like. Hit "Save" and this will update automatically, which is great, so always make sure to be using smart objects. Let me show you how to use one. This we know is the front part. I'm just going to double-click on it. As you can see, temporary Photoshop file is going to open, and this is what we have at the moment. I'm just going to open illustrator and I've already prepared my file with three clipping masks, one for the front, one for the side, and one for the back of pack. I'm just going to go ahead select my front, copy it and open Photoshop and paste it into Photoshop. When you're hitting Command V or Control V, you will have this little window pop up. Always make sure you have smart object selected, otherwise you won't be able to change this in the future. Once you have smart objects selected, just hit "Save". Your image will paste it into Photoshop so just adjust it to the right position and size, but we add and delete the placeholder. Now we can just hit "Save" and close the file. Automatically that file will update this file and we'll have our front of pack in place. We're going to do the same thing with the side of pack so let's double-click on it. Again, we'll have a temporary file with a place holder so we can go to Illustrator, copy our side again, and just straight paste it into Photoshop. Again, make sure it's a smart objects and hit "Okay". Once again, take time to adjust it to the correct size. Once it's in place, you can again delete the placeholder and hit Command ''Save''. Once it saved, just close it and here it is on the side as well. That's super easy. One thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that the lid matches the color of the other sides so we can just, here where it says color, just double-click on the square. With the eye dropper tool, just color pick the same blue as the background and here we have it. We're going to do the same for the other packaging. As you can see, the smart objects for the first box updated everything for the second box as well. In this case we want the side of this box to be our back of pack. What we're going to do is we're going to select this smart object, which is this one and right-click on it. By clicking on new smart objects via copy, we're going to create a new smart object which is not going to be linked to any smart objects that are already present in the file. We can go ahead and delete the previous one. This copy we can just rename as back of pack. Double-click on it and again, go onto our Illustrator file, copy the back of pack and paste it in Photoshop. Once again, make sure you adjusted to the right size. Once you've done that, you can again delete the other layer and hit "Save" and here we have it. That's our back of pack on the side as well. Last but not least, I think I'm going to add some funky colors to our background. I think it would be quite cool to use some of the accent colors in our design. We can just go ahead and just close these layers as we're not going to be using them and open the background folder. As you can see, this says wall color so we can just double-click on the square and pick a color. I think it can be quite cool to have maybe pink to make it a bit more fun and press "Okay". When it comes to the floor, I think yellow could be really nice. Here we have it. This is our mock up, as you can see, just by creating something as simple as this, we can elevate our design and just show it in a more professional way. Now that it's done, just make sure you've saved it and share it in the project gallery as well.
9. See You Soon!: You did it. We've created a playful and engaging back of pack. We've turned aside, which is usually boring into something interesting and worth stopping for. We've covered everything from packaging basics, what is back of pack and what are the most common elements we can find on it. We've also had a couple of examples to get inspired and deconstructed and analyzed the chosen back of pack. We then started thinking of what elements we could have added to our redesign as catchy rollout. Last, but not least, we designed it in Illustrator and mocked it up in Photoshop. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this class is the importance of back of pack. As you've seen these often, an overlooked side that has a lot of potential. I hope that in the future, when you're working on a packaging design, you'll just take a minute and start thinking and challenging the back of pack, in order to make it a bit more interesting and fun. It'd be awesome if you could upload your project into the project gallery of the course. I'm looking forward to see what you guys come up with and just learn from each other's projects. If you enjoyed the class, it would be great if you could leave a review, and if you're interested in knowing more about packaging design, make sure to follow so you'll get notified when I'm going to be uploading more classes about packaging design. Thanks again for enrolling in this course and see you soon.
Beatrice Menis, Branding & Packaging Designer
