Like my college classmates, I studied industrial design with thoughts of going into furniture, electronic products or auto design, the sexier subdivisions of ID. Package design never occurred to any of us as an option until one of our number, a guy named Randy, got an internship doing package design. It paid roughly 50% more than any other ID internship at the time, and when he came back to the studio and told us what he was making we all dropped our glue guns.
Randy quit that internship after a few months to take an even more lucrative one doing POP (point-of-purchase) design. Upon learning of the vacancy, I called the first place, secured an internship with them after an interview, and after graduating I had steady freelance work from them for 12 years.
That was a long time ago, but what do ID students think of going into packaging design now? Packaging News hits The New Designers show at London's Business Design Centre to find out:
via packaging news
Packaging Design needs a lot of Understanding of the Material Behavior, a little of Engineering, Process Parameters, and understanding the customer and his requirements well. Besides all these a lot of interest and patience is required to go through every project. When the customers does not say anything then you should accept that you have won and continue with the next project. That is in short about a Packaging Structural Designer.
Packaging is more than just pretty graphics on a box. It is the first touch point of any consumer and with the proper research and insights, can be very important and powerful to the success on the product. It is a shame that it has not been a serious focus in ID school, because there is major opportunity for ID in the packaging world, but it usually is the last thing designed and gets the least amount of time.
I have to agree with Joe on the way these interviews were done. It appeared to me that most of these kids thought of packaging design as mostly graphic design and they did not understand the impact great packaging design can play in the consumer experience.
If you get into packaging design for the money you've grossly misused your design education. If you've supposedly some insight into consumer habits and your primary drive is to earn money - go work for yourself. Build a business. Do something more interesting.
In that sense, you can elevate Design to a state of mind and not just some toolbox of cad and rendering you bought from a school probably advertising on facebook.
I'm sorry, but it seems like the kids in this video are just responding to what the interviewer wants to hear - If I were a recent grad desperate for a job and "Packaging News" was asking me questions I'd probably tell them what they want to hear too.
It's a shame, news like this is the kind of thing that brings the entire discipline down.
Now that is a nice article. It is still rare to find good packaging design training, but the possibilities are endless. A good packaging designer deals with structural design and has the skills to turn plane materials into 3D products. That is useful for products made with paper, wood, metal and plastic - not only packages.
I've been working with packaging design for about 3 years now and I must say I'm still surprised with the forms we can create from simple sheets.
The packaging industry can use more industrial designers. I stumbled into packaging design the exact same way. However, I started off in P.O.P. then packaging and now I'm with a major brewing company.
While it's not as glamorous as other fields of industrial design, it compensates well.
Clemson has a BS program in packaging design (possibly the only one in the country?) for undergrads that one of my best friends went to (I was an architecture student).
He's always had pretty interesting jobs, including one where he was developing and testing packaging for a major brewing company. The best perk was when they were testing how much pressure the packages could take before breakage occurred to the bottles inside. The thing was, once a 12 pack had been through the wringer, all of the bottles could not be reused, even if only one or two broke... The result was *almost* more free beer than we could handle...
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I have to agree with Joe on the way these interviews were done. It appeared to me that most of these kids thought of packaging design as mostly graphic design and they did not understand the impact great packaging design can play in the consumer experience.
In that sense, you can elevate Design to a state of mind and not just some toolbox of cad and rendering you bought from a school probably advertising on facebook.
I'm sorry, but it seems like the kids in this video are just responding to what the interviewer wants to hear - If I were a recent grad desperate for a job and "Packaging News" was asking me questions I'd probably tell them what they want to hear too.
It's a shame, news like this is the kind of thing that brings the entire discipline down.
I am also an industrial design student thinking about getting into packaging design in the future.
I've been working with packaging design for about 3 years now and I must say I'm still surprised with the forms we can create from simple sheets.
While it's not as glamorous as other fields of industrial design, it compensates well.
He's always had pretty interesting jobs, including one where he was developing and testing packaging for a major brewing company. The best perk was when they were testing how much pressure the packages could take before breakage occurred to the bottles inside. The thing was, once a 12 pack had been through the wringer, all of the bottles could not be reused, even if only one or two broke... The result was *almost* more free beer than we could handle...