For this project we had to seek out a product that we felt had below optimum packaging and come up with a better way of presenting the product. For my package redesign, I chose to do the cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios. The original design was a rectangular box with warm colors, a couple of visuals, and too much text in my opinion. I thought that, despite the box feeling pretty visually busy, it was missing visual hierarchy. It had lots of text that distracted from the overall design on the front of the box, but when you turned the box over, it was sparse, other than a children's game. This information that they have on the front could easily be moved to the back side to help elevate the design of the product. After I bought a box of it and found that it wouldn't fit on the shelf in my cabinet, my main grievance became the product dimensions. I felt it was too tall and that it was very visually boring amongst the other boxes on the shelf of grocery stores. A good product should grab a viewer's attention and pull them in to look closer at the product. To accomplish this my first idea was to change the shape and presentation of the product. I did thorough research on product design and read articles about what products are doing well this year and why. Trying to gain inspiration for design elements from these products that have proven successful was a helpful research stage for me.
I considered all the different shapes that I could use but the one I opted for was a hexagonal prism. The hexagonal shape is a nod to the hexagonal shape of a honeycomb and tries to further the connection between the product and its packaging. Keeping with the hexagonal shape I made a simple pattern in Illustrator using similar colors to what was used originally just tweaked to not be as dark. When it came to text on the product I tried to reduce a large amount of it seeing as that was my original turn off of the real design. I wanted to change the font that was used as well to find something that could tie itself together with the theme more. I decided to go with the font Milk and Honey, which to me looked like dripping honey because of its curvature and flowing design. My hope was that the finished product would feel thematically cohesive and convey the products messaging clearly to the consumer. I simplified the text down to what I considered essential and removed the rest so that the front of the box would present simply the product's name and tagline. I included the rest of the mandated information on the back of the package and in small font on the front. Through this process, I believe that I have accomplished my goal of elevating this product's design.
