Hi Everyone!

Something completely different from me once again!
A few weeks ago I got the CD with my latest schoolwork on it. This year I am going to be doing Certificate IV in Graphics PrePress – its the ‘post apprenticeship’ program which means only a couple more units that need doing. Two of those I am doing at work and the rest (I think three) I will be doing at school. When that will be I don’t know!

The most interesting of the on-the-job projects is the Advanced Typography one. There are two briefs we have to fill. One is a CD cover and the corresponding booklet and the second is this one – A muesli package design. Now this is really my forte I suppose when it comes to graphic design as it’s what I do every day. We don’t print on card but the considerations for food packaging are much the same across the board.

The most important thing is that type has to be legible. A lot of information usually has to be part of the design – things like the Nutritional Information, ingredients, addresses and the various certifications etc. These are often printed quite small and you really have to think about what font you’re going to use. A fail-safe in the food packaging industry is trusty old Helvetica. Many designers I’m sure think it’s boring and unimaginative – but really, nothing compares to Helvetica when you’ve only got a tiny space to fit 10 lines of text in.

Another thing to consider when creating a design for food packaging is colours. With magazine printing, you’re usually going to be able to get away with the standard CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). However, with packaging you are often working with special brand colours that must be very consistent across very large runs. Think of Bega red, Cadbury purple and Woolworths green. The only way to achieve the consistency you need is by using the Pantone Matching System colours (PMS). Plain CMYK can also get muddy and you don’t get such a wide variety of vibrant colours as you can get with the Pantones.
Also, sometimes you need more than just the colours you can see . In my line of work, for those vacuum sealed smoked hams you see in the fridge at the supermarket we need to add two opaque whites and also a clear varnish. It’s a bit easier to print on paper but it’s often you’ll need a varnish for that too.

Now for my design, the brief was to use CMYK plus two Pantone spot colours. I wanted to try something modern and sleek as it’s not something I’m often allowed at work (don’t ask!!!). The fonts I kept simple, using only Adobe Caslon and Neutraface. I’m loving Neutraface at the moment! It’s got a lot more edge than Helvetica, but it’s still easy to read and has a wide variety of styles within the font like small caps and different weights from thin to bold.
I’m no font genius, but I am absolutely obsessed with them! I can spend the majority of ‘design time’ picking a font. Each one has a personality and they all say a different thing. Neutraface is confident, timeless and cool
I chose Adobe Caslon for it’s beautiful ampersand (the ‘&’ symbol) – this was the basis of the design which I built the rest around. It’s also used in the Jasper’s logo.
The photos on the front I took off www.sxc.hu and comped them together in photoshop. I added the shadows and cut them out. Nothing too difficult there. The photo on the back came with the brief and is completely untouched at the moment.

There are still a few things I think that need tweeking. I’ve got to add a few more lines of text in which I’m a bit puzzled about at the moment. And I’m not too sure about the nutritional panel.

What do you think?

Speaking of apprenticeships and school…. I’m officially finished on the 28th of July! Yippee! I will get a proper salary (not that I’m not getting paid nicely already) and all that jazz. Yay!

Tags: blue, cereal, fruit, Graphic Design, muesli, orange, packaging, rmit, school, teal
Categories: Art & Design, Graphic Design, Vectors

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Art & Design, Graphic Design, Vectors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.