Category: Typography

Packaging

Making the Product the Package and Vice Versa

By Delphine Hirasuna |

choco12

Is it possible to brand a product without creating a printed label? At the Accademia Italiana in Skopje, Macedonia, design student Petar Pavlov was determined to find out. In a Packaging Design class, he was assigned the task of creating a packaging prototype for “something very dear to him.” He chose chocolate, he says, because it is “something that I can’t live without.”

Petar, whose study focuses on graphic design and visual communications, says that his obsession with typography, along with his decision not to use any printing for the packaging, inevitably led him to the idea of turning the chocolate itself into letterforms that spell out the name of the product.

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Foreign Correspondents

Typography in China

By Delphine Hirasuna |

caligraphy

Editor’s Note: The global marketplace is real. Some brands are as familiar to consumers in Rio de Janeiro and London as they are to shoppers in New York City and Mumbai. That does not mean that the world now speaks a common design language nor approaches design in a universal way. What resonates in one culture may be rejected as odd, irrelevant or ignorantly offensive in another. In some cases, consumers may find the product appropriate, but the sales pitch tone-deaf and riddled with cultural clichés. Designers working across cultures confront the challenge of understanding differences in business and social customs, technologies, and typical design assignments as well as aesthetic preferences.

In the interest of broadening our knowledge, we are launching a “foreign correspondents” feature, beginning with our dear friends, Anita Luu and Sing Lin, two American designers who opened their Affiche International Asia office in Shanghai two years ago. An innocent question about the availability of Chinese typefaces led to a fascinating discussion, which is presented here.

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