Packaging is a promise. The higher quality we see on the outside, the more we expect from the inside. But for small business owners—who are their own manufacturers, accountants, bosses and hype men—it can be exhausting trying to be their own designers too. Maybe they just have a rasterized file. Maybe it’s just a drawing their friend did. Maybe—in one memorable case—it’s just a patch off a jacket. That’s where I come in. I can spin the plainest straw into packaging gold—on time and on budget. No first-born child required.
Regrettably, the original photo submitted by the client is no longer in my possession. It was a beautiful shot of a hand-cut metal sign that had directed local buyers into a farm stand for decades.
But a new generation now owned their family farm and they had a vision: their brisket and sausages on a supermarket shelf. So they came to me to preserve the old world charm with a real-world logo.
One of my favorite customers was a condom company out of Boston. Sometimes their files were perfect, band logos or event titles with clean formatting. More often, they were files from a non-profit health clinic, which meant clip art or letterhead logos poorly scanned on an overworked office copier. There would be a shoestring budget already stretched to the breaking point, a vague idea of what they wanted to get across, and me.
Pictured to the left is the kind of proof I would send them. Options for designs and gentle suggestions. No one wants to use a product in a sloppy looking package, and that goes double for a health clinic.
This original art was a rare beauty from the customer. But their budget didn’t allow for it, and it wouldn’t print well on clear stock with the product visible below. And of course…it wasn’t set up as vector art. That’s where I came in: keep the integrity of the original design, but offer better options for the situation at hand.
It was always a relief when a customer came in with an open mind. If they knew their art was blurry or rough, and gave me free reign, I could always come up with something attractive. That’s when I would frequently bypass the customer service department and give the customer some one-on-one attention. They would drop so much information in a simple phone call. You could tell from their tone what they were married to in a design, and what they could live without; where they could compromise, and where they had to stand firm. It was always a nice reminder that I was looking at pixels, but nurturing someone’s livelihood.
This was a very common occurrence: a customer would have a rasterized logo, a shape they wanted to fit it to, and a color (or lack thereof) that they wanted. And honestly, these were the favorite part of my day. A little detective work to find the font, a little archeology to find the bones of their art, a soupçon of salesmanship et voilà, the perfect proof.