OUAN503 - UCC Coffee, Packaging Design

Creating the decoration and designing the cover for the packaging was one of the longest aspects of the project because so many changes and modifications were made throughout the process. I started off by designing a basic theme for the packaging before going on to apply it to all of the other types of coffee within the 'Grand Cafe' brand. I wanted some colour of the packaging so it didn't look as bland so I isolated the top section where the logo would appear by adding a strip of colour all the way across. My thinking was that this colour could change based on the type of coffee it was, but for this being the first one I went with a dark green colour. I feel like the front needed something else besides text and logos, the idea came to mind to make a pattern that I could again include on all of the different types of packaging. I started drawing flowers and leaves, because I thought these would work best with the brands message but also tie in with the logo and the idea of keeping in touch with the environment. I used a biro to draw these so I could get a mixture of sharp thick lines but also some thinner lines, without losing the quality of the line and keeping it intact. It didn't take too long because I wanted it to look a little less refined and more hand drawn. Once the drawing was complete I scanned it in and overlaid some colours, giving it the read colour shown in the image below. Then to take it a little further and prepare it for being added to the packaging I added a cut out filter, which in turn added a geometric look to it, and cleaning up the drawing as a whole.



For the most part, all of the assets that were to be added to the packaging was already available to me. The 'Grand Cafe' logo I had made, the imagery, any text was made before it was added and finally certification logos just needed to be added to the front or back. I decided to make the logo the largest bit of text and place it in the centre within the green strip so that the white colour of the text was most easily visible. I felt like the packaging was missing something in the middle so I created a box for additional information regarding the coffee to go. It ended up that for each of the types of coffee I added the locations it was sourced from. To coincide with this I included a map on the back pinpointing all of the locations that 'Grand Cafe' coffee is sourced from. There were certain bits of information that were quite important to the packaging and the brand itself that I added in various places, the tasting notes on the front and information about the company on the back.

There are four types of coffee under the 'Grand Cafe' umbrella and each one has a unique name and blend that separates it from the others. In the brief outline, UCC Coffee stated that we are able to change the names of the pre-existing blends or even create a new one if that's what we want to do. The names they had were, 'Fairtrade', 'Fairtrade Decaf', 'Triple Certified' and 'Rainforest'. The names essentially associate the coffee to the certifications they've acquired whether it's fair-trade or a triple citification. I thought these names, although appropriate could do with a slight adjustment. I played around with a range of name combinations, starting with their ethos and words like 'sustainable' to even connotations of rainforest life, such as tribe and a combination of all of these ideas. Eventually I renamed them to; 'Sustainable', 'Decaf', 'Tribe' and 'Fairtrade'. Here there is a mixture of presenting the brand in a more fun and less certification driven way, as well as reminding the customers of the brands ethos and also mentioning some of the sustainable aspects of the coffee, so the fact it's fair-trade coffee for example. I tried to choose earthy, natural colour schemes to couple with the branding and the type of language the customers were being exposed to and the descriptions of certain coffee and the tasting notes that were provided in the brief. I repeated the process of adding text and altering colours dependent on the type of coffee until they were all complete and worked well as a set of coffee types under the 'Grand Coffee' avenue of UCC Coffee.

Overall, I quite like what I was able to do from start to finish regarding the packaging and certainly aspects of the brands identity are quite well communicated through the hand made appeal of the different aspects of the packaging. Although, if I could go back and alter the packaging, I would have given it a much cleaner look, as at the moment although it looks quite quirky and environment driven, it does feel a little clunky or at least crowded when looking at it. I think I did okay considering this was the first time I've made some packaging from scratch, but I definitely need more development in future. I did my best to make sure everything was covered and logos were on the correct packaging. Perhaps what I've learnt here is that I need to spend more time arranging things in a way that looks professional and clean, as it makes a big difference to the overall quality of the final outcome.