While not always the case, often, the experience of buying products from the pharmacy can be negative. The fact that pharmaceutical packaging is often plain and dull doesn’t do much to help this. So through this project, I aimed to not only change the buying experience through creating interesting and inviting innovative packaging, but also to fill a gap in the cosmetics market.
If you look at the cosmetics products in pharmacies, it becomes quickly clear that almost all of the men’s cosmetics are provided by cosmetics brands that originally catered to women. To change this, I created “Primax” - a brand which would offer a wide range of cosmetics products designed specifically for men. I created a number of products and brand and identity for this fictitious men’s cosmetics company, developing a packaging system that was both more appealing to customers and filled a niche in the market.
This project began with a lot of research. To create a brand for a men’s cosmetics company, I did research into not only other cosmetics brands, but also into what content is included on these brands’ product packaging, so that I could make sure to include all the necessary information on Primax’s packaging.
Using my research, I then began the conceptualisation phase, experiementing with logos and colours to develop something that would appeal to the personas I had created. I then developed a few different concepts for a brand and identity for Primax before selecting one and creating a style guide (pictured above) around it, noting how the colours, fonts, patterns and other brand elements should be used.
After finalising the brand and identity, the next stage was designing the packaging system. To do so, I first needed to decide on what sort of products Primax would sell, and how these would be contained - for example, whether moisturiser would be in a tube or a tub. I decided on 3 products which would form the basis for asuite of cosmetics products: moisturiser, lip balm, and sunscreen. I particularly chose these products, as I recognised that when it comes to products like lip balm, men have very little to choose from. After deciding the products, I looked into containers for similar products to determine what dimensions to make the tube of sunscreen, tub of moisturiser, and chapstick. After determining the sizing of the containers, the next step was to develop the packaging.
Taking the dimensions of the containers into account, I explored different shapes and designs. I knew I wanted a simple, boxy and strong build, as this would complement the branding and appeal to the target audience. As well as this, I also wanted to give the packaging a ‘premium’ feel, and make it stand out from other packaging, which led to the designs seen at the top of this page.
The next stage was the prototyping stage. Knowing how I wanted the packaging to look was one thing, but actually making it look that way was another, and involved a lot of testing out with paper of a similar thickness to what would be used in the final packaging. I started by determining what 2D net would be needed to make the packaging, and then prototyping this and constructing it to check that it actually worked.
While my first net design worked, it resulted in a lot of wasted paper, so I redesigned them to be more economical while still keeping all the necessary components (like tabs for gluing and extra margins for folding). Once I had arrived at a final net design, it was a matter of refining the design by adjusting the margins and testing repeatedly, until the 3-piece design (pictured below) fitted together nicely.
The last stage involved prototyping with the printed designs. Using the nets I had created, I had to design the packaging according to the brand I had developed and the research I had gathered, ensuring that I could fit all the necessary information on the packaging (even at small sizes, like the lip balm packaging). I positioned the design elements so that they would be oriented the right way around when the net was folded together, and made sure that no important information was cut off, and that none of the text was too small. To confirm this, I prototyped with the printed design a number of times, which led to me discovering that I had put the ingredients list upside down, and that there was not a wide enough margin left around some text areas, and that the back of the base net needed to be coloured, so that when the packaging was constructed there would be a consistent colour on the inside. After adjusting these elements, the final design was created, printed, and successfully constructed to create a packaging system which was sturdy, appealed to the target audience, felt ‘premium’, and would stand out against other pharmacy products.
