First packaging iterations

So I posted on Thursday that I hoped to have finalised packaging up the day after - not so!  Like everything else, I do many iterations before I hit on something I feel I can take forward.  This post will show a few of them, and when looking at the final design it should hopefully show how all the ideas here fed into it.  

I began with a packaging layout and started on the strawberry girl.  I thought about only using the illustration on the front face of the packaging here, which was later decided against as tea is a food product where people need to know what flavour or ingredients they are getting.  Had I chosen to do a different kind of illustration which centred around food, this might have worked, but that is not the case so labelling had to be added after the stage shown in Figure 1.  I had considered taking influences from traditional vintage tea packaging, but at this point I found it faster to design it to fit with usual contemporary tea package designs as it would be more helpful to my practice.

A description of the product, how to  brew the tea and nutritional information were all added after looking at tea packaging in my flat.

Fig 1

I wanted to offset the main illustration with something a little more organic, which "popped" visually against the more detailed vectors.  The drops suggested liquid and the pink colour hinted at the sweet flavour of the (fictional) tea.

Fig 2

An iteration of the style above was Figure 3, where the teardrops were positioned to offset the frame I put in to centre the illustration of the girl.  The font I used was Neutron, but I knew after laying it all out that I wanted something a little punchier.    This was later switched to American Typewriter, which I used in Figure 4 and found to be a good combination of legible, pastiche and fitting with the layout.  I had other fonts in mind to use which would have offset the style of the vectors nicely, but these were an alphabet of full capitals which is hard-going on the eyes, and therefore not suitable for packaging where information is important.

Fig 3

In the for iterations for the lemon tea packaging, I tried out a fruit pattern to see if a kitsch aesthetic would work for this.    It was a little more static than I had been hoping for the packaging to be - I had hoped the visuals would look a little more dynamic, however the fruit pattern made it clear what the ingredients would be which I thought was important at this point.

Fig 4

Fig 5

 These stages were important to show as it is the experimentation which led to the final packaging visuals, which will be posted very soon!