Design
5 min read

Product Packaging: Design Tips to Make Your Product Stand Out on the Shelf

Published on
January 20, 2023
Blank white product packaging on a white shelf
Contributors
Leah Camps
Marketing Executive
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Your product’s packaging is a chance to not just explain your product to a viewer, but it also helps you to stand out on a busy shelf and likely, in an even busier market landscape. When customers have so many products to choose from, what gives yours the edge? Product packaging really can make or break the success of your product, so it’s really important you get it right. That being said, what are some key tips for effective product packaging design and how can you achieve your design goals?

1. What is the purpose of your packaging?

To begin, you’ll need to understand the main purpose of your packaging. Most food and beverage items will need the basics like the name of the item, the nutritional value and the ingredients. The most important job of packaging is to identify the product, but can you also use the space to tell your brand’s story? When your brand develops it’s story, it can help prospective customers to have more of an emotional connection, meaning that they are more likely to develop loyalty to your brand. 

So, how can you use product packaging to tell a story? One way is to use imagery, fonts and colours that express the origins of your product. Is your brand eco-friendly? Use lots of natural and organic shapes in your design to help portray that to a viewer in just a few seconds. You can also make use of iconography in product packaging to quickly communicate your brands mission to a viewer. Try to consolidate your copy to just a few words or a sentence that sends a powerful message about what your brand's mission is.

2. What material is your packaging?

The next key part of effective product packaging design is thinking about the material that will be used. It's important to think about how durable the packaging needs to be, any food-safety or child-proofing precautions as well as the environmental impact of the packaging. 

With consumers becoming ever-more conscious of the impact the products they buy have on the environment, it’s becoming increasingly important for brand’s to make sure that their product packaging can be reused or recycled.

3. How well does the packaging reinforce your brand? 

Product packaging is a key part of your branding strategy. To make the best use of the packaging space, make sure that it is in keeping with your brand identity and reinforces your brand in the consumers mind. You can do this by using key elements of your visual identity such as brand colours, fonts and font pairings, imagery styles and your logo. Copy can also be used to help reinforce your brand's tone of voice.

The goal is to help your consumers recognise your brand at a glance in amongst the busy shelves, and that can only be done through a strong visual identity. Your product packaging should stay in keeping with the rest of your brand assets, including your website and social media feeds.

In this article, we've reviewed three of the most important questions you'll need to answer in order to design the most effective product packaging for your brand. We hope this has helped to make your journey to a successful product launch that bit easier, but if you'd like some more help from our team make sure to check out our unlimited graphic design subscription plans. Our designers have years of commercial experience and know just the recipe for powerful product packaging, and are here to help should you need it. For more design tips, have a look at the rest of the Design Cloud blog.

Contributors
Leah Camps
Marketing Executive
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By subscribing you agree to be contacted by us inline with our Privacy Policy.
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Need help with design work?

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