On the Design and Orientation of Packaging Design (4)

Innovation, seeking beauty, and seeking change are people's common mentality. In popular terms, it is the psychology of pursuing freshness. People are becoming more interested in traditional style packaging after they have used the modern style of packaging. Hong Kong and Macao compatriots have always welcomed packaging and decoration with auspicious meanings. "Fuk, Lu, Shou, and Yi" are all good forms that they can never afford to wear. It can be seen how to grasp consumer psychology has become one of the characteristics of modern commodity packaging and decorating design. The packaging design of modern commodities is first to study consumers and study consumer psychology. All blindness should be avoided before designing, and design plans should be drawn up based on reality.

"Location design" is a product of product competition. The design is to study how to break through the existing packaging and decoration forms and levels of competitors. If other people's product packaging highlights the place of origin and its origin is its advantage factor, then it is necessary to highlight the advantages of other aspects of the product, especially the features that competitors do not have. This is the focus of work and the design method of choosing a positioning.

Positioning has been described in the three aspects of positioning, in most cases, each piece of packaging and decoration should highlight a key, or highlight the trademark, other content can be placed on the side or back of the package, or highlight the product or consumer . Because the packaging screen is limited, it is impossible to cover everything. If the content is too much, it is easy to make the screen crowded. It is better to highlight a certain aspect and the effect is stronger and better. The so-called positioning is focused on highlighting advantages. Of course, the use of associative positioning as needed is also a common method, as we have mentioned in the section “Creative Ideas”, and there should still be a tendency of performance (positioning) in this case.

To sum up, positioning can be roughly the following seven ways:

1. Positioning of trademark brand;
2, product positioning;
3, consumer positioning;
4, the combination of trademark brand and product positioning;
5, the combination of trademark brand and consumer positioning;
6. The combination of product and consumer positioning;
7. The combination of trademark brand, product and consumer. This type of positioning should have a major tendency and cannot be averaged in three ways.

In the increasingly personalized consumer and diversified marketing methods, modern packaging design has evolved from basic functions such as protection of goods, beautification, and promotion to more emphatic, multi-perspective, and visual representations of the times. The positioning of modern packaging design is usually reflected by three basic factors: brand, product and consumer. The popular one is: Who am I? What to sell? Who to sell to?

Three brand positioning

It is to show consumers clearly who “I am”, and the image of the product and the company's logo is registered and protected by law. Once the product is called a well-known brand, it will bring huge intangible assets and image to the company. What brings to consumers is quality assurance and consumer confidence. The brand positioning feature is to highlight the brand's visual image in packaging design.

1) Highlight the color of the brand When designing a brand, several fixed color combinations are usually formulated to become "image colors" in the company's products, giving consumers a strong visual impression. For example, the green color of Fujifilm, the medium yellow of Kodak film, and the big red color of Coca-Cola have all had a strong visual appeal.

2) The graphics of the graphic brand highlighting the brand include promotional images, cartoon styling, auxiliary graphics, etc. In the packaging design, the main graphics are used as the main force of expression, so that the consumers will create associations between the graphics and the products themselves in the impression. The image of product promotion is vivid and vivid. For example, the denim image of Marlboro cigarettes, and the red geometric aid graphics on the packaging, the Kirin image on the Kirin Beer packaging in Japan, and various cartoon images appearing on the packaging.

3) Highlighting the font of the brand image The brand image of the brand is one of the main manifestations of the brand personality due to its readability and non-repetition, such as Coca-Cola's brand font, McDonald's “M” letter image, all in the package The most important part of the image expression.
Four packaging design product positioning

1) Product Features
2) Functional positioning of products
3) Product Origin Location
4) Traditional Features
5) Monumental Positioning
6) Product Positioning

Five consumer positioning

1) Location difference
2) Differentiating the physiological characteristics of lifestyle positioning

As a modern packaging design education, students are largely lacking the "W" positioning ideology, or positioning is not accurate enough. Our students are not vague about What, Who, When, and Wer when they are doing package design. The understanding of Why is not deep enough. It is precisely the most basic quality that a designer has. Students often do not know why such a visual image is used as a design expression element. It is only based on feelings. It feels that formal beauty can be, but ignores the fact that the form serves content. Even the best form cannot precisely convey the content of the product. It is also a failed design. In the classroom, it is often found that students are first designed after the concept, and then according to the design draft take it for granted to give it a design concept, which is completely contrary to the design law, the design without thinking through the brain is never suitable for the needs of the market; students first After the hands-on approach, I think it is because of the inaccurate positioning of students on the design. As a student, when receiving a design draft, they should quickly understand What, Who, When, and wh, and then develop Why's concept; because the packaging design's positioning ideas are closely related to the concept of packaging design; design concept as a Image thinking, from the first draft to the drafting of the entire thinking process are inseparable from the specific image. How to select the key points and highlight the topics on the basis of sorting out the various elements is an important principle in the design concept. In the classroom, students did not fully consider the nature of the product when choosing color, text, and image, resulting in the design of the packaging box is not suitable for the product's personality, such as: students in the morning milk packaging design, some students' design draft is like doing The packaging of pure water is not for the packaging of dairy products. This is because students are not allowed to locate color and image, and they do not understand the nature of the product in depth.

Due to the particularity of students' own knowledge structure, the students’ ability to create forms is slightly lacking. Often when a student has achieved better results by using one form, there are many students to imitate, rather than according to their own pictures and products. To consider the nature of the problem, such as: When students in the classroom to use cow cartoon image to express dairy products, other students also use cattle cartoon image, which results in a single design style, but also for students to produce dependence, Lack of independent design and operation capabilities.

In class, in order to enable students to find accurate points of appeal, I have summarized the following types of images commonly used in packaging design.

First, take the image of the product itself as the main image. That is, the reproduction of goods is directly applied to the packaging design through realistic product photographs, so that the information of the commodities can be more directly conveyed, and the consumers are also more easily understood and accepted.
Second, the production of raw materials as the main image. This kind of packaging design is mainly to highlight the individual features of raw materials.
Third, take the brand, trademark or corporate logo as the main image. This type of brand, trademark or logo is often already well-known in the market. As long as it is further strengthened, it will be easily accepted by consumers.
Fourth, the use of goods as the main image.
Fifth, to emphasize the characteristics of the product itself as the main image. Such as milk can emphasize its pure white and fresh.
Sixth, the product or raw material origin as the main image. For example, "Mengniu" brand milk takes the Mongolian grassland as its image.
Seventh, use the object as the theme image. Such as children's milk powder packaging can use children as the main image.
Eighth, take the common animals, plants and flowers as the main image in daily life.
Nine, the special effect of the text as the main image. Text is the most direct way to convey information and it also meets audiences at different levels.
Ten, with a unique texture texture or pattern as the main image. This kind of packaging design should be based on the nature of the product itself. For example, some Chinese traditional food packaging can use some traditional Chinese patterns. This design has more national characteristics.
Eleven, the unique color of the product as the main image. Such as the green tea, brown chocolate and so on.
. For students, the teaching of packaging design should first of all understand the theoretical knowledge of the students. With respect to the design orientation of the packaging, I hereby provide some theoretical points for the following:

Packaging and decoration and packaging modeling have common features in the basic design process, but both have specific characteristics in terms of specific design methods. The former mainly focuses on the effects of the plane visual communication function, while the latter mainly focuses on the container's shape. Functional and stereoscopic visual communication function effects.
Packaging and decorating design is not simply a picture decoration, but must be a combination of specific product information transmission and visual aesthetic communication design. If the modeling structure of the package should mainly accomplish certain material functions, then the packaging and decorating will focus on completing certain spiritual functions.


(1) Creative Ideas The most important aspect of packaging and design is "creative ideas." Creative ideas are the soul of design. Creative ideas are what designers should “show” and “how to express” on the screen. A very important point in many good packaging designs is that they can break through and innovate in their ideas. This is just like a comic book creation. A comic book with a fantastic creative style often requires only a good deal of writing. It is a humorous effect that people can think deeply about aftertaste, fun and laughter.

Packaging design is for goods, internal goods and consumer demand are the first, and packaging is subordinate and second. Therefore, the idea of ​​design concept should be closely related to the requirements of the content to the form, that is not only in the art to show the personality characteristics of the product, the personality characteristics of the designer or the consumer group, so that the packaging is novel, unique, infectious, and able to Attract consumers and reflect as far as possible the inherent qualities of the product and its functional superiority.

Before designing ideas, it is necessary to make investigations and preparations for the products and some situations related to the products. The survey contents usually include the following items and contents:
1. Various information about the product (such as raw material, product quality, use, performance and price, etc.);
2. Trademarks (whether famous or more famous);
3, product attributes;
4, sales target;
5, commodity grade;
6. Local customs and practices of product sales;
7. Vertical and horizontal comparison of products (mainly referring to product quality and improvement);
8, packaging container materials, size, size, shape, etc.;
9, the history of the manufacturer, the characteristics of the location, etc.;
10. Information on packaging and decoration of similar products;
11, understand the manufacturer's vision and preferences for product packaging.

For the above items, we can use the list method to sort out what we can understand, find out the needs that can be expressed in the design, and stimulate our creativity.

Generally speaking, the key choices mainly include the three aspects of the trademark number, the product itself and the consumer. Some product packagings with famous trademarks or brands can be marked with trademark brands, such as the “Coca Cola” in the United States; products with more prominent features or packaging of new products can use the product itself as the focus of design performance; and some Product packaging with specific or special consumer groups can focus on consumers. Among them, the performance of focusing on the product itself has the greatest performance. In short, regardless of how they are performed, they must focus on communicating clear information about the commodity but the emphasis should not be simply understood as a unique factor. Instead, there should be a