making la box

The 3D representation in Illustrator

Making the nutritional information with the white arrow tool.

After having problems mapping the art to a 3D box i decided to cheat and use photoshop to map the art onto a plain 3D box, using the distort free transform tool.

these are all the symbols I used in my box.I used the make envelope tool on the text, before making it 3D and glowing. I thought that a green and white colour scheme for this section, which is reflected on the right side and the back, would help to convey the healthy message of less salt - similar to the whole grain green banner used on Nestlé cereals.

3D Practice

After reading some of the second years' blogs, I wondered if illustrator would be able to handle putting my design on a 3D box with all the paths, gradients and effects I've used, so i decided to have a practise go. Whenever I tried to make a symbol for the back and the front, to put in the 3D shape, illustrator crashed. I managed to do it by saving the designs as high quality jpegs and then importing them back in and turning them into symbols, then mapping them onto the 3d box, which worked well.

Fish Back

The Back of the box

The top hippo is underwater now, becuause it's talking about holding its breath.

Making my box

Front of the box

This is a screenshot of all the files I've saved so far of the front of the box. The font I have used to spell 'Hipp0s' is similar to the font used on 'Coco Pops', which has the same target audience as my Hippos. I changed the name from Harry Os to make it more simple, and so there's a reason for the picture of the purple hippopotomous (even though coco monkey or tony the tiger or anyone don't make much sense anyway) The first and most recent version is nearly finished, I just need to add the weight and a short description of the cereal.

Back of the box

On the back of the box I want to have a large nutritional information section for parents, about how healthy Hippos are, on one half, and the other half for the childeren. I've put a little did you know bubble, but I might include a wordsearch or maze or something, to make it a bit more interesting for childeren.

In the parent's healthy section I've used natural colours, and purple, to give it a natural look, and green ticks on the bullet points, similar to the ticks on Cheerios packaging, to signify that the cereal is good for childeren and the right thing to buy. The childish scribble effect on the background was nice, but made it a bit hard to read, so I will have to tone it down or revert to the plain version (bottom row).

Front, Side, Back

Without checking the dimensions, i have quickly put this together to check that the colours and shapes will work when the faces are mapped to a 3D box. I've also added the logo on the side of the box as I had planned in my sketchbook.

Alternative fronts

Experiments with different colours and layouts. The pastel colours in the top row I don't think would work on a cereal packet, as usually cereal is in bold, warm coloured boxes. And I prefer the way the hippo looks like he's eating the cereal in the original design.

Typography Experiments

These are some experiments of typography and colours, with reference to Coco Pops

Cornflakes

I decided to look at different branded cornflake boxes, to look at the similarities between them, and their differences. They were Kellogs, Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys and Whole Earth organic cornflakes. The organic cornflakes are a bit of an anomaly in terms of the packaging design becuase they are marketed as a natural alternative to kellogs or supermarket own brand cornflakes.

The supermarket own brand boxes are all similar colours, red yellow and orange, which could be because supermarkets want their customers to recognize which product they want if they are in a supermarket they don't usually shop in.

Cereal - 'Healthier'

The packaging for cereal marketed as being 'healthier' tends to have more subdued colours, and a simple design. Organic shapes like leaves and corn make is look all natural and lovely.

Cereal - Childerens

If I chose to make a cereal box, I would have to consider which type of cereal to package. This is becuase there is a wide range of cereals available in the shops, with different target audiences and therefor different packaging designs. The most obvious 'genre' is Childeren's cereal, the boxes usually have a cartoon character on the front and a more colourful and bold design.

Packaging Yourself - New Project

For this project I will be researching conventions used in product packaging and using them to make my own packaging based around my name. I will be looking at

• Colours
• Graphics
• Typography
• Logos
• Layout

At the end of the project I will have produced a 3D representation of my packaging, made using Illustrator.

At the moment I am deciding between making a box for:

• Tissues
• Cereal
• Tea
• Ready meals
• Cereal Bars

I think that the ready meal would be the hardest to make, because from looking at the Sainsburys, Iceland and Birdseye websites I've noticed that they all have photographs of the food on them, which would be hard to make as a vector image, without using live trace.

Tissues and tea would be easier, because they are not advertising how they look, because people don't really care what thier tea bags look like, and tissues all look basically the same inside the box.

From looking at the sainsburys website tissue section I can see that the graphics on tissue

boxes are mainly feminine colours and photos of soft things - feathers, flowers, water ripples etc. The main exception is the Kleenex 'Mansize' tissues, which are clearly marketed to men, with the dark, metallic look and block capitals reassuring customers that the new pack still contains mansize tissues.