Hasta La Ideas

Your product’s packaging is arguably the first thing the consumer sees, as a part of the product experience. It forms the first ever interaction between product and consumer, and a successful interaction means a consumer will pick the product up off the aisle and add it to their cart. Bad packaging design can adversely affect a product’s success or its performance, while a well packaged product allows it to stand out, prompting someone to pick it up and decide to purchase it. Packaging Design is more than just a box with artwork… it’s the product around the product, and deserves as much attention while designing as the item within it.

Packaging Design forms just one of the various categories of the A’ Design Award and Competition, which spans the popular categories like Architecture, Lighting, and Consumer Electronics, as well as the obscure, lesser known categories like Cybernetics, Prosumer Products, and Safety Apparel Design. The A’ Design Award’s ultimate goal is to be an umbrella that covers good design across all disciplines, which is why it has 100 different categories for submitting design projects, and over 200 jury members (comprising academics, design professionals and press members) from all around the world collectively judging the works. Winners of the A’ Design Award don’t just win a trophy and a certificate, but receive an entire PR Campaign dedicated towards pushing their career, clout, and even their projects to newer heights. A’ Design Award’s winners and even its participants are included in its annual award book and business network, while additionally contributing to their country’s overall design ranking that paints a holistic picture of how design-centric and design-forward each country is.

The A’ Design Award is currently accepting entries for the 2020 edition of the award program, so go ahead and give your work and career the push it deserves!

Here are some of our curated picks of Packaging Design winners from the A’ Design Award & Competition 2019. If you have a potential packaging design project that you think is worthy of an award, click here to register & participate in the A’ Design Awards 2020. Hurry! The regular deadline ends on 30th September!

01. Awanama Sake by Ryuta Ishikawa

With the kind of sheer finesse you’d expect from a handle on a samurai sword, the Awanama Sake bottle is just a canvas for its beautiful texture. Designed to stand out from the category of sake, Awanama wants to introduce its unpasteurized sake as a new brand of rice-wine that’s authentic and deserves universal recognition. The bottle comes with a heavily textured black exterior that catches the eye, while also remaining opaque so as to shield the sake inside from external light. Made from glass, Awanama’s bottle surely knows how to attract with just how intricately detailed the texture on it is, practically hypnotizing one into wanting to pick it up!

02. Eco Freshness Tag by Zeyuan Zhang

Designed so you never end up having stale poultry, the Eco Freshness Tag lets you know when your eggs have gone bad. Yes, you could submerge your egg in water to see if it sinks or floats (if it floats, throw it away), but then again, you could also just look at the color of the tag, which alters over a period of 10-14 days. A green tag indicates the egg is fresh and ready for consumption, a yellow tag probably means you should consume the egg right away instead of waiting, and when the tag turns red, just ditch them eggs!

03. Raimaijon Pasteurized Sugarcane Juice by Prompt Design and Cordesign

The ingenuity of the Raimaijon sugarcane juice bottle is that when stacked, it literally looks like a sugarcane stalk! The slightly warped cylindrical bottles nest one on top of another, while the label gives it its green color. When you stack 2 or more, the bottles begin looking like sugarcane stalks, complete with nodes between them! What a wonderful way to use the bottle to trace back the product’s origin story! This would make for a pretty eye-catching installation on a storefront, would it not?

04. New Hope Seed Brand Gift Box by Yung-Li Chen – Fineherbsoap Co. Ltd.

When you buy one of Fine Herb’s soaps, you’re doing much more than just buying soap. You’re buying a plant too! The organic natural soaps come in white vessels with a small seed taped to the bottom. Take the soap out and water the seed and it eventually grows into a herb. You can then put some soil into the vessel, turning packaging into a planter for your Zinnia seedling! And don’t worry, the planter is made from mixed pulp of 100% recycle paper and lavender grass seeds, making it eco-friendly and biodegradable too!

05. Cedea Luxury Mineral Water Bottle by Nick Pitscheider and Sharon Hassan

Designed as an homage to Cedea, the goddess of water and life in the Dolomites’ Ladin Culture, the bottle pays homage to the Northern Italian culture and its lore, with two water bottles, one representing the ruby red of roses, and one capturing the stunning blue of the sky. What’s genuinely remarkable is the bottle’s construction, that’s designed to perfectly refract light in a clever way. The bottle’s bases are colored either red or blue, while the rest of the bottle is completely transparent. Look at the bottles head-on, and you see clear water in them, but look at the bottles when they’re below your line of sight, and the glass’s refractive property makes the entire bottle look either blue or yellow. Its lens-like effect aside, the bottle looks absolutely beautiful too, with its gently swirling form highlighted by the twisting vertical lines that give the bottle a delicate spiral asymmetric shape, resembling the natural shape of Cedea, the Goddess of Water and Life.

06. Dinosaur Ice Cream Box by Mengying Zhang & Zhicheng Chen

A fun way to make kids enjoy the experience of eating ice-cream (enjoy it even more, rather), the Dinosaur Ice Cream Box comes with an embossed dinosaur fossil shape at its base. Fill the tub with chocolate ice cream that represents the soil, and your kids turn into archaeologists who have to dig through the ground with their ice-cream spoons to hit the fossilized treasure at the bottom! When you reach the end of the box, the remnants of ice-cream look like stray pieces of soil near the dinosaur’s carefully preserved fossil. Now if only there was a way to use this box to get kids to eat more of their veggies!

07. Small Bag Candle Packaging by Liangfang Fang and Jinxi Chen

Just an elegant way of packaging a candle, Liangfang Fang and Jinxi Chen’s solution involves a small, flat piece of paper that’s pinched and folded, with a neat tape on top. What’s really worth appreciating is its simplicity and its minimal elegance… and the fact that it literally looks like packaging for a chocolate, because those candles look absolutely edible, don’t they?!

08. Ooops! Use Toilet Paper by 2Republic BTL Reklámügynökség Kft.

While the designer’s name may certainly be a handful, the Ooops! toilet paper is intentionally designed to be a handful too! Unlike most toilet papers that come packed in sets of multiple rolls, and require to be unpacked and mounted on a toilet-paper-holder, the Ooops! toilet paper comes in a pack of 3, and can literally be used inside the box! The packaging comes with a handle, allowing you to easily carry it around, within the shopping mall, and also inside your house, from the store room to the loo, where you can just place the package right beside your toilet. The package comes with an opening on the top, which you can use to pull out as much toilet-paper as you need. Designed to be used without a toilet-roll-holder, the packaging dispenses the paper directly from itself. The rolls inside the box are center-fed, which means there’s no cardboard tube at the center of the roll… it’s paper right from start to finish. That doesn’t just give you more toilet paper per roll, it also means you can pull the paper out like you would from a tissue-box. Easy peasy!
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Impressed? Inspired? Go ahead and grab a spot for your own designs at the A’ Design Award and Competition 2020! Click here to Register Now! Hurry! The regular deadline ends on 30th September!