OUAN503 - UCC Coffee, Packaging Research / Planning

With no experience making packaging or working with nets and designing functional packaging I needed some more information or better yet a guide to show me how to proceed. I had looked online at a lot of different sites and couldn't find anything about the different nets coffee packaging was composed of. The closest thong I found to what I needed was a German website containing some vague information about packaging and some not very useful instructions on how make it. I then spoke to Mike and he suggested going to the library as there is a whole section containing books on all kinds of packaging for various purposes. I took his advice and went to the library, straight away there were a range of books filled with nets of different types of packaging that could be useful to me. I found a book titled 'Big Book of Boxes', it had all types of packaging for different purposes and a whole section on food and drink packaging, which is exactly what I needed. When looking through this particular section of the book I found something that resembled the types of packaging I'd been looking at as research - described as a 'takeaway bag' I assume it's the type of paper bag that people collect food in when coming away from a restaurant. As far as the packaging for the brief, it would have been fine I'm sure to simply get a template online and wrap logos and packaging designs around it, but I decided it would be more personal and less generic to replicate the packaging from the book and make it out of brown paper to follow in my original idea of having a sustainable and environmentally friendly material to make the packaging from. The book proved to be incredibly helpful and not only had the shape of the net but also measurements and indicated where to cut and score when creating the packaging.

Here is the page I used to replicate the packaging from. The post-it note has some measurements on it that I had to adjust in order to scale up the net onto a larger sheet of paper. The darker image on the bottom left of the page is what the packaging looks like when the net has been assembled, and it looked very similar to some of the packaging I had been looking at. As well as this, it has a folded over top, meaning it can be rolled up as the contents of the packaging get less. Finally, the packaging has a rectangle base, meaning it should be able to stand up by itself if it was in need of being displayed or placed on a counter top. It was created using normal brown paper as a mockup and I then drew the net onto the paper with the correct measurements before scoring the lines that were to be scored and cutting out the net. The folding process required some thought but fortunately nothing went wrong and the packaging was complete.



In total I created two types of packaging. One was the packaging from the 'Big Book of Boxes' and the other was something I improvised based on some of the designs I had found whilst researching different packaging types. It was made using an envelope and started our as a test before I realised it had potential to act as an alternative example of packaging for me to use. The first example of packaging below was the one from the book, and I was really happy about how it turned out. I attempted to photograph it in several ways so that it was shown being held and also an angle from the side to demonstrate the width of the packaging. Although I liked the shape of this type, I was concerned that for a standard 500g bag of coffee it was much too tall and not wide enough to accommodate this. In essence, it wasn't the right dimensions. Despite this I quite liked the shape the the way the top could be folded over as much as it needed to be. I had the idea of sealing the top but decided to leave it unsealed to show the full height of the bag itself. From the 3/4 view you can see the shape of the bag from the top to the bottom is almost like a triangle, that leads from the entrance to the bag all the way down to the base which is a rectangle. Another concern I had about this type of packaging is would it be sturdy enough to hold up with 500g of weight inside it and I had the feeling that if the contents was distributed unevenly it would have trouble not falling over.

The second type of packaging I made was the one I made using an envelope and sealing the sides to create a diverging shape. I have seen this type of packaging quite a lot before, and not just with coffee but other types of food products too such as rice. The function of the packaging is that it can be ripped open from on side at the top, and poured our as needed before being sealed however the consumer likes. I think this shape of packaging has quite a nice look to it and most of all it's very simple compared to the other type of packaging I created. This is a tried and tested shape as far as coffee packaging goes and in the UCC Coffee brief there seems to be a lot of information that needs to be included on the packaging because of the coffees credentials and the logos that are associated with it. Taking these into account, it may be a better option in terms of presentation and functionality of the packaging to choose the second design I made. As I haven't made any packaging in the past this may also be the safest option as it means that the layout is a lot simpler. To rounding off this section of the design process, I liked both of the packaging designs that were options to me moving forward, both were functional and tried and tested in the market and I'd seen them frequently during the research I had conducted. I decided that it would be better for me to opt for the second design out of the two as it again felt more appropriate for the type of rustic appearance I was attempting to go with, and felt like it would be an easier task laying out the logos and information that was going to be wrapped onto the packaging.