branding suites have a lot of potential in and of themselves, and when we get to design the entire thing from the ground up, it becomes a real playground! this brief involved both brand and packaging design, which meant equal doses of playful doodling and tightly controlled print/construction process.
the produced suite: paper and plastic loyalty cards, and a variety of wrapper designs.
there's a kind of kinship between japanese and scandinavian product design, called zakka- sort of minimalist, sort of kitsch; playful, but considered. i'm a big fan of both nordic and japanese design, and i love the way sweets and treats are sold and displayed in both regions. a bright colour story and a clear aesthetic (with a few mid-century kitschy nods) was the direction i wanted to go in, with the personal touch of a cute doggy mascot. you just can't go wrong with a cute doggy!
the loyalty cards had to come in two formats, paper and plastic. digging around in my wallet, i realised that most paper cards used stamps or hole-punches, and that usually in the process of marking the card, the design became disrupted or broken. i wanted to factor the marking process into the design of the card. for the 'mallow' suite, hole-punching creates randomly-patterned confetti!
keeping things legit! we aimed for making products that could legally be sold on shelves, which meant making room for dietary details and nutritional information, as is required of confection goods by australian law once an item reaches a certain set of dimensions.
the process of making something high-quality and legitimate involved a big chunk of research, and a couple of field trips. (yes, one of those trips was to go and buy a lot of chocolate. yes, it was super fun.) commercial design and print is its own beast with its own highly skilled roles and responsibilities, and i have huge amount of respect for those trade roles after dipping my toes in industry waters for this brief.