Makuvara wanted to create a healthier alternative to snack products in the Finnish and Swedish markets. The result was Maqu, a more health conscious snack with a balanced mix of macronutrients.
Product information tetris
The project was my first foray into packaging design and my job was to transform a number of early designs to production-ready layouts. Most of the big design choices were already made: product names, colours, typography and illustrations. Despite all this, it turned out there was still quite a ways to go.
By the end of the project, I had taken part in designing:
Three different flavours of fruit cup.
A cardboard box to contain said fruit cups.
Three designs for pouches (with the same flavours as the fruit cups).
Three different flavours of soup cup.
A lot of time went into fitting all of the product information into a limited amount of space while trying to maintain flexibility for future changes. The earlier, spacious designs turned out to be misleading – you could forget about all of that white space.
The packages themselves imposed some limits on what you could do with the designs as they would allow for different kinds of layouts depending on their characteristics.
Mostly, I wanted to make sure all of the information was neatly organized, accessible and skimmable. I'm particularly happy about this part of my contribution. It brought to mind my own experiences trying to hunt down whether some product contained a particular ingredient or not. I wanted to save the potential user every little bit of time I could.
Ultimately, the project was a highly enjoyable one with interesting design challenges and something new to learn at every step of the way.