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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Quizzes

Quiz: Name That Brand

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Some brand graphics are so familiar and entrenched in our memory that our brain often registers the name based solely on the logo’s shape and color. Our mind “fills in the blank,” even when the name is hidden from view. The color and shape of the logo are part of the brand’s identity. They often have as much equity and recognition value as the name itself. In certain circumstances when a company wants to signal major improvements in quality, product offerings or reputation, walking away from or tweaking old brand elements may not be a bad idea. But it shouldn’t be done casually.

See if you can guess these brand name from the shape and color of their logos. (See answers at end of article.)


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