Amazing packaging design: exteriors as important as contents

It’s a fact that these days, packaging design concepts count as much as the contents do. After all, in a highly competitive marketplace where the difference between one product and another may be very small, every little bit of creativity counts. Today on The Leap we bring you a roundup of some of our all-time favourite packaging designs, to inspire you to new heights of creativity. First up: the truly impressive peelable packaging created by J Walter Thompson Brazil for Smirnoff. Let’s bear in mind that many truly great package designs are based on simplicity, not complexity. The idea here rests on the idea of bringing the fruit flavour of the vodka to life. How do they do it? By encasing it in a lifelike skin, which is peeled to reveal the bottle beneath. Sure, this amazing packaging concept was never rolled out on a commercial basis (these were promotional items) but the work went on to win awards and make a real splash with designers the world over. Much like the Juice Box concept, created by Japanese designer Naoto Fukusawa, which takes the same thinking and applies it even more literally, as textured skins which communicate the contents. Check these out:

Simple, clever and eye-catching: great packaging design should be irresistible 

As our worlds and daily lives are becoming more cluttered with product advertising, so the Holy Grail in packaging is increasingly design that stands out by being simple, yet clever. All the stripped-down hipster-styled typography and logowork which has taken centre stage of late in the design world? It’s a reflection of a return to simpler, easier and yet more effective marketing. When the world’s full of noise, something quiet and subdued makes a powerful statement. Take a look at the great - and humorous - work done by Quebecois designer Simon Laliberté‘s great paintbrush packaging (below). It shows the type of thinking that immediately creates attention, and generates discussion: two key marketing tools which guarantee exposure well beyond any marketing budget. With these brushes the tactile factor is key, which the Caipiroska and Juice Box examples also offer: they make you want to touch them, and thus engage with what they contain. They’re intriguing, and make people curious - and curiosity generates investigation - result! The same tactile factor applies to the massively-awarded Bzzz Honey packaging, from Armenia. The brief for the packaging was to create something so interesting that this relatively-unknown an underdog Armenian brand would make a big splash international, and raise the country’s profile, whilst making sales tick up nicely. That’s been achieved many times over, since the curvaceous and tactile package designed by Backbone, an innovative design studio from Yerevan, has generated huge numbers of mentions on design and packaging sites and won numerous awards. OK - we spoiled you today with a splurge of interesting stuff (and quite possibly distracted you enough to eran the wrath of your bosses!), but that’s all we have for today - time to get back to creating amazing design! Hopefully we’ve inspired you to new heights, and will see some of your inspired work entered into Skillshow - it’s our new design showcase, and Round 1 is all about packaging design. If you have work that never got taken up by a client or never progressed beyond the concept stage, we’d love to see it! Get more info Skillshow HERE!