Category: Packaging

Zero Waste Packaging

KFC Good for You, Good for the Earth

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Some of us remember the time when our Japanese grandmothers would give us bite-size pieces of hard candy that we could pop in our mouths wrappers and all. The translucent “tissue” would easily dissolve because it was made out of rice paper.   Back then, it was a delightful novelty, but now it may be a solution for the mountains of packaging waste produced by fast-food chains. In Hong Kong, KFC is offering chicken sandwiches wrapped in edible rice paper and printed with edible ink.  It makes sense.  It cuts down on litter.  It’s a tidy way to eat fried chicken without dropping greasy crumbs all over.  And it is still “finger lickin’ good.”

Designed by Ogilvy & Mather Group Hong Kong, the edible wrapper was created to pair with KFC’s bunless Double Down sandwich, which features two pieces of fried chicken in place of bread.  If you eat every last bite, you are responsibly contributing to the Zero Waste Movement.

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Design the Product into the Packaging

By Delphine Hirasuna |


Why try to describe the product with images and words, when you can die-cut the package and give shoppers a peek inside? Especially when it comes to pasta noodles, it is helpful to see what the actual noodles look like instead of trying to recall the difference between fettuccine, rigatoni, vermicelli, macaroni, etc. This concept packaging by Moscow-based designer Nikita Konkin used the different shapes and textures of pasta noodles to create silhouettes of fanciful hairstyles in the die-cut windows. The noodle hairstyles framed a simple one-color line drawing of a woman’s face in a memorable and playful way.
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Brand Language

Ramen Shows Its True Flavors

By Delphine Hirasuna |

For decades, ramen has been considered “cheap eats.” Dry ramen noodles with a flavor foil packet could be bought for less than 30 cents a box. Just add a cup of boiling water, steep, and eat. More than one college student has subsisted on instant ramen for months at a time. Ramen wasn’t featured on the menu of fancy Japanese restaurants. That’s no longer the case. Now Americans are being exposed to the delicate yet complex flavor of true ramen. Freshly made ramen noodles is served with a wide selection of broths, including pork, chicken, seafood, and beef, and served with artfully arranged toppings such as vegetables, mushroom, seaweed, meats, egg, and the like.

Trendy ramen bistros are popping up all over the U.S. One of the most notable upscale ramen houses is Afuri in Portland, Oregon. The sleekly modern restaurant, which seats 90 diners, features ramen as its main specialty, and is renown for its signature ramen dish made with a citrusy yuzu broth.

Portland-based Murmur Creative was commissioned to develop a sweeping design branding program for Afuri that combines the Japanese aesthetic with the Pacific Northwest’s inviting style.

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Packaging

Brew Your Mind

By Delphine Hirasuna |


In Budapest two friends Bihari Akos and Himmel Oiver, both engineers, indulged their love of craft beer by setting out to make the country’s “craziest, freshest” artisan beer. Their creations led to going commercial in 2014, establishing the Brew Your Mind Brewery to introduce an inspired variety of craft beers, including some with aromatic tropical fruit flavors.

To position the unique originality of their beers and ales in the marketplace, they hired Budapest-based Classmate Studio to design the brand identity and packaging for Brew Your Mind. Classmate bypassed traditional beer packaging designs and created labels showing 3-D lines and optical illusions. Each beer type was given its own name – Yellow Haze, Peach Please, Evermind, Endless Waves, Bright Lies, Money Cannon — and its own abstract package design and signature colors. The impact was eye-catching, fun and contemporary. For the Brewery logo, they placed a line-drawn eyeball on a silhouette of an old-fashioned beer bottle cap with crimped edges, kind of like eyelashes. Online the logo appears to blink, altering from looking like a simple bottle cap to a winking eye. In a few short years, the sophisticated branding has helped to make Brew Your Mind the top craft beer brewery in Hungary.
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Film

Lesser Known Design Professions: Film Propping

By Delphine Hirasuna |

When people think of becoming a designer, they usually think of print graphics, industrial, digital, environmental, interior, software, etc., but design encompasses a lot more territory than that and has many subsets. This is an interview with Dublin-based designer Annie Atkins who specializes in creating authentic-looking props and graphics for such films as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Here, Atkins talks about her craft and the importance of paying attention to seemingly insignificant details.