Food & drink · Brand identity, packaging, motion
Branding and packaging for food and drink.
Coffee, tea, juice, chocolate, a restaurant. The brand is decided on a shelf or in a doorway, in about two seconds, by someone who is hungry. I design the mark, the packaging and everything around them so that those two seconds go your way.
Work so far: Forester Coffee, the Tokyo tea company Fohatsu, the Munich juice brand DOTOD, the coffee retailer Coffeepolitan, a praline workshop in Skopje and a restaurant group in Barcelona. The last two cases are on their way to the site.
What matters here.
01The shelf comes first
A pack is seen next to twenty others and from two metres away. Before anything else, the range has to read as one family and each product has to be found at a glance. For Fohatsu every sort of tea got its own colour; for DOTOD every fruit got its own dot pattern.
One idea, not decoration
Food packaging fills up fast: origin, weight, claims, barcodes. The identity needs one picture strong enough to survive all of that. For Forester Coffee it is antlers growing out of a cup, and the three roasts each carry one photograph.
It has to work in the hand
Bags, labels and cups are held, poured, carried and thrown away. I design on the real dieline, check the print on the real material and keep the small type legible for someone reading it at breakfast.
The café is part of the pack
A food brand lives on the counter, the menu, the takeaway cup and the Instagram feed at the same time. The same three colours and one mark run across all of it, or the brand falls apart at the door.
Work in food and drink.
02
Questions.
03Do you design the packaging as well as the logo?
Yes, and usually together. A logo that has never been put on a pack tends not to fit one. I work on the dieline from the start and hand over print-ready files.
We have a product but no name and no brand. Where do we start?
With a conversation about the product and the people who will buy it. Naming can be part of the job, and the first design directions come with a few names to test.
Can you handle a whole range with many flavours?
That is the normal case. The system is built so that a new flavour or a seasonal edition can be added later without calling me, and the guide explains how.
Do you also do the café or restaurant interior graphics?
Signage, menus, wall graphics and the takeaway line, yes. The interior itself is for an architect, and I am happy to work alongside one.
What does it cost?
After the first call you get a fixed quote for the scope we agree on. No price list, and no surprises on the invoice.
How long does packaging take?
Usually four to eight weeks from brief to print files, depending on the size of the range and how fast decisions are made on your side. Printing and samples come on top.
A food or drink brand? Write to me.
Two sentences are enough: what it is and by when. The rest comes out in the conversation.
Also for Dental practices · Sport · Architecture & construction · Startups & tech