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 218 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 secure 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 2021 edition of the award program, so go ahead and give your work and career the push it deserves!
Here are some of our favorite Packaging Design winners from the A’ Design Award & Competition 2020. 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 2021. Last day to submit your work is the 28th of February!
01. Wulianghong Liquor Packaging by Sisi Don
Inspired by the traditional ingredients and practices that come together to make the Wulianghong liquor experience, the bottle and packaging for this alcoholic beverage do a brilliant job of being not just aesthetic, but culturally relevant too. For starters, the bottle comes in this three-piece box, inspired by the screens often found in oriental architecture. Designed to not just encase the bottle, the box allows you to display it too, using two opening panels. The artwork on the box isn’t printed, but rather is embroidered, making it quite a collectible while also paying tribute to the national art-form of China. The bottle comes with a 3D design of a peony-flower too, the national flower of the country.
02. Soulmate Perfume Packaging by Himanshu Shekhar Soni
This two-part perfume comes as one single unit that splits into the two separate perfume bottles. Designed to be a gift you’d give to your significant other, the Soulmate Perfume comes with both him-and-her (or them-and-them) perfumes that you can use together. The two bottles come interlocked as a pyramid, and split apart into separate perfume-bottles (sort of like Britney Spears’ Fantasy fragrance) when you want to use them, reuniting into a single form once you’re done!
03. Ouch! First Aid Kit by Xiaofei Liu
This unique-looking first-aid kit comes with biodegradable packaging, and a novel hexagon-form that opens up to reveal the medical kit within. Open up the Ouch! kit and it cleverly segregates into 3 separate parts – bandages/gauze, medicines/ointments, and other eqipment like gloves, cleaning towelettes, etc. Open it up and you can instantly access the box you want to use immediately, instead of rummaging around through items. Each individual box even has pamphlets with instructions on how to use the contents inside!
04. Bakers Dozen 13-Pack Egg Carton by Randy Ludacer
The Bakers Dozen egg carton is a wonderful play on an old-time practice, where bakers would often add a 13th loaf to the batch of 12 loaves to avoid being penalized for selling underweight bread. The Bakers Dozen egg carton reinterprets that with its 13-egg tray made from papier-mache. The tray’s form is 6-sided (sort of like an elongated hexagon), allowing them to not only store 13 eggs but also enabling them to be tessellated like a honeycomb so as to efficiently pack them together!
05. Greyder V Shoe Packaging Design by Musa Celik
The way the Greyder V shoes sit inside their box is influenced by how we walk. The shoes form a V-shape, emulating the way our feet are postured in between steps. The shoes rest on these inclined ramps that are suspended to the Greyder box using cords. To access the shoes, just pull out the ramps and they swivel out sort of like a drawbridge to reveal the sneakers within.
06. Yagumitan Honey Packaging Design by Jiabo Lu and Kun Luo
You’d be wrong to think that the Yagumitan Honey is just like any regular honey. It comes from a wild colony of bees found living on the cliffs of the rocky Yunnan mountains, far from civilization. The word “YAGUMITAN”, which means “the honey seeker in the valley”, is an ode to these bees, and the packaging reflects exactly how rare and precious the contents within are. The box comes with a faceted design, almost like an obsidian stone, while the bottles inside look like cut diamonds, holding within some of the scarcest wild honey in China.
07. Bonita Pour Femme Perfume Packaging Design by Vishal Vora
The objective of the Bonita perfume’s design was to represent fashion, class and tie to an object that was quintessentially feminine. Inspired by the hobo bag’s shape, the Bonita perfume comes with a crescent-shaped bottle, and a braided leather strap connecting its sides. The brown-tinted fragrance inside completes the illusion of it being a leather-made bag, and there’s even a leather tag hanging from the side for extra impact!
08. Source One Vodka Spirits and Alcohol by Aether NY, LLC
Source One’s bottle is interesting because it isn’t just faceted, it’s also a spiral (something you’ll probably notice after looking at it for the second or third time)! The bottle takes inspiration from greenhouse architectural elements and spiral staircases, creating something that is eye-catching and unusual to look at… not just architecturally, but even for a bottle of vodka!
09. San Liang Jiang Beverage Packaging by Wen Liu and Xianwen Wu
How do you show that your product is not just premium, but precious too? You could, like the Yagumitan honey, make the bottle/packaging faceted and gem-like, or you could do something as bizarre and beautiful as the packaging for San Liang Jiang. The San Liang Jiang beverage comes in a bottle the shape of an ancient relic, but that isn’t all. It comes in a box, packaged in a compressed clay-like brick. In order to retrieve this antique bottle, one must quite literally excavate it by using the tools provided to shovel-away at the outer layer, revealing the relic within. The process is interactive, and rewarding as you use tools to remove the dirt and dust and reveal the precious item underneath it! This would make for an incredible unboxing video!
10. 2019 National Card Collection Day Deck Playing Cards by Alexander Chin
Inspired by the palaces of Morocco, the 2019 event design pays tribute to the iconic architecture of the region with traditionally decorated gates and exotic geometric patterns. The packaging is an interactive experience designed to mimic the exploration of a Moroccan palace. The experience rewards users with escalating stages based on their efforts in the journey. Lift up the gateway-inspired sleeve and stack multiple packs together and the gateways transform into an endless beautiful palace corridor!
Impressed? Inspired? Go ahead and grab a spot for your own designs at the A’ Design Award and Competition 2021! Click here to Register Now!