My fiancee always has her eye out for exceptional printed samples because I’m always talking about custom printing. She has become a printing aficionado, and I always get a steady stream of new ideas from her.
We were at the beach recently, and she gave me three commercial printing samples that caught my eye. Here’s what she gave me, as well as my assessment of either why they work particularly well or what we can learn from them:
The Cosmopolitan Cover Tip-On
To begin with, a tip-on is a separate printed sheet glued to the front or back of a press signature. In many cases I have seen fugitive glue used in this process to allow for the easy removal of the attachment. Fugitive glue is like rubber cement. You can easily peel off a printed sheet (or even an object like a plastic card) that has been fugitive glued to another printed sheet.
This particular issue of Cosmopolitan magazine included a fake cover (or additional cover), with the logotype of the magazine (often referred to as its “flag”) printed at the top of a cover-weight gloss press sheet (above a perfume ad mocked up to look like an actual magazine cover). It had the word “Advertisement” printed at the top, but to me it looked like a real cover (complete with a knock-out box for the inkjetted address, carrier route sorting information, and the Intelligent Mail barcode).
Now I have seen many similar tip-ons added to the front cover of magazines, but for the most part they have been produced on uncoated vellum bristol paper (postcard stock). They have looked like cover wraps, and for the most part they have imparted information (usually that it was time to renew my subscription) adorned with the publication branding and some light marketing copy.
What made the Cosmopolitan tip-on so intriguing was that I was certain—until my fiancee peeled it off the actual magazine cover—that this was in fact the true cover. The logotype made it believable. It was sexy. Now that’s powerful marketing.
The Organic Apple Chip Bag
It takes some serious marketing mojo to get away with charging more than $5.00 for a small bag of chips. And this particular vendor succeeded masterfully.
The next piece, which would be considered “flexible packaging,” is printed in solid black heavy coverage ink. With a loupe I can see black halftone dots under the solid black ink coverage. I learned this technique when I was an art director. Black ink by itself can look washed out. Since I can see some imperfections in the ink when viewed through my loupe (it looks a little uneven and watery in places), my guess would be that the job had been printed with flexographic equipment. This is often used for flexible packaging.
To minimize the slightly washed out look of the ink, the designer had specified black ink over a black halftone screen (as an alternative, he or she could have also opted for a “rich black” ink, a composite of black ink and other process colors). This works beautifully. It makes the entire bag seem lush and indulgent. It also makes the 4-color apple and reversed, hand-lettered type (actually just a simulation of hand lettering) jump right off the page.
The design is cute (the logo is made of sliced apple chips placed to make letters), and the simulated hand lettering gives the product a relaxed, casual feel. The organic specifications (gluten-free, fat free, non-GMO, etc.) provide a healthful and sustainable aura, targeted at customers in the upper financial echelons who want to be healthy and environmentally sensitive. If I had the cash, I’d pay this much for a product of this caliber.
Needless to say, since you can’t test the chips before you buy them, all of this mojo has to be conveyed through the lush ink coverage, the contrast between the images and the background, the playful typefaces, and “crunchy granola” marketing copy. This is a success.
The Sidewalk Chalk Box
The third sample is really less of a marketing success and more of an educational tool, providing in a small format all you need in order to grasp the concepts of die cutting, scoring, and folding (as well as laminating a 4-color printed cover sheet to fluted cardboard stock).
What appeals to me about this simple package (known as “folding carton” work on “corrugated board”) is its educational value. If you disassemble the carton and lay it completely flat with the printed side down, you can see the fluting of the cardboard, all the scores for folding the flat box into a three-dimensional finished piece, all the die cut tabs plus the die cut window for the front of the box, plus the one tab that has been spot glued to allow for joining the four sides of the box (exclusive of the top and bottom) into a cardboard cube.
On the flip side, you have a sheet of enamel litho paper, printed in four colors and laminated to the corrugated board.
When you wrap it all up and stick the tabs where they should go, you have a three-dimensional product. It is no longer a flat, printed sheet. It is an object you can hold in your hands, a cube, even before the manufacturer puts the toy in the box.
What makes this interesting to me, beyond the education it provides in how boxes are constructed, is that in creating every box a designer must take into consideration the physical properties of the finished packaging as well as its design (how at appears) and its marketing message (both the content of the copy and the emotional effect of the graphic design).
But once it’s in the store on the shelf with innumerable other items, all of this goes out the window. Then it’s just you and the box. Will you buy it, or won’t you?
This entry was posted
on Saturday, October 29th, 2016 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Packaging.
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