Packaging seems to be 50% design and 50% business strategy. Effectively pitching design concepts in combination with business strategy is a difficult skill to master, but there are many methods of communicating in a clear, organized manner.

Like Landor, the Art Center Packaging Program is encouraging students to follow an “Overview, Challenge, and Solution” method that quickly summarizes your research, strategy, and execution of a project.

Here is an example from Landor’s Altoids Packaging. It’s a pretty good example of how to craft your descriptions for those giant presentation boards for Ania, Gerardo, and James’ midterms/finals. Oh, and it’s pretty too.

The original Altoids parent brand packaging.

Overview

Altoids is a hugely successful brand of mints owned by Kraft Foods. To grow the business, Altoids planned to introduce new items that used the product and brand equities on distinctive packaging designed for sharing. The first such extension was a fruit sours line, small hard candies that took the idea of Altoids’ curious strength into a related product category. The next extension was for breath strips, a new category of powerful breath refreshment.

Challenge

Landor was asked to design the front and back panels for the fruit sours round tin, as well as an inside paper. The design needed to be true to the brand’s heritage and build on the packaging equities of the mouth mints. Beyond those requirements, experimentation was encouraged to keep the brand vital. For the breath strips, Landor needed to translate the parent brand equities into an entirely new category.

Solution

The fruit sours descriptor had an antiquated, quirky feeling that was in keeping with that of the Altoids parent brand. The first flavor to be launched was Citrus Sours, a combination of real lemon and citrus oils. Careful consideration was given to colors, embossing, and the typography used, as well as to the relationships between all graphic and typographic elements. The design for the breath strips adapted many of the graphic elements used on the packaging for the parent mints, creating a distinctive small tin that stands out from competing brands.

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