Packaging Designs

Below you'll find examples of my packaging designs. Each section will have a Header with the title and date of the design, a background paragraph briefly explaining the design and a few pictures of the design.

AiCC 2017 Structural Design Competition (in progress)

The AiCC (Association of Independent Corrugated Converters) design competition is issued yearly to packaging students as an opportunity for students to demonstrate their abilities as designers while working with corrugated fiberboard and other paper packaging materials. The competition is divide into three sections, structural design, graphic design and corrugated as art. I chose to participate with a small team and competed in the structural design challenge. The design prompt for 2017 was to package a 16 oz. hammer and four generic light bulbs in a manner that the package could be shipped via parcel delivery and arrive intact.

-To be continued-

K-Cups, Boxes of All Sizes (CAD in Packaging, Spring 2016)

This was a semester long project that served as the "proof of competence" for the CAD class I was taking. Our task was to design a series of packages that would contain single serving K-Cups (for the Keurig Coffee machine) in a series of sizes, a 2-Pack, a 12-Pack, a 36-Pack and a shipper that contains 8 of the of the 36-Packs. The second part of the project was to design a brand that would appeal to Virginia Tech college students. The last part of the project was palletize our shipper design to obtain a 90% or better space efficiency.

I had fun with this project, inventing a company called "BOLT COFFEE" that produced a rather outrageous marketing campaign angled towards capturing a specific demographic of the college student population. This campaigned centered around outlandish claims hoping to capitalize on the shock factor that after reading the package, the college student would purchase it because of the offbeat humor. This was coupled with a unique package, deviating from the normal 2x3x2 packaging pattern to 12-high column package. This new package feature a tear-off section that would turn the packaging into a dispenser, allowing the consumer to retrieve one K-Cup at a time.

The 36-Pack featured 3 12-Packs contained within a larger paperboard box. This box offered a tremendous amount of billboard space and featured cereal-box type games and interactions on the back (such as blank area with a prompt to get consumers to draw something and submit it to the company for a chance to win free stuff).

College and Coke (CAD in Packaging, Spring 2016)

My last assignment for this class was a fun one, I was tasked with creating a collegiate themed Coke can and 12-Pack packaging. The driving concept behind this task was that Coke was sponsoring a charity event and needed a collegiate themed 12-pack paperboard package designed for entrant. Coke would then produce these collegiate themed packages and sell them in stores around the associated colleges. The college that bought most of their associated 12-pack would get to choose what charity would receive the profits from the event.

There were several steps to this project, we were required to not only create the graphic design of the 12-Pack, but also model and create the cans that would be placed into the package.

For obvious reasons, I elected to create a Virginia Tech themed package. I chose to incorporate two Virginia Tech icons, the landmark Pylons and the well known Hokie Bird. The Pylons embody Virginia Tech's core values of Brotherhood, honor, Leadership, Sacrifice, Service, Loyalty, Duty and Ut Prosim (That I may serve). The Hokie Bird is synonymous with Virginia Tech, born from the historic mascot of a Turkey.

The last piece of this puzzle was hybridizing Coke's slogan "Open a Coke" and Virginia Tech's slogan "Invent the Future" to create a unique slogan for this package that also captures the spirit of the charity event, "Open the Future".

Combining all of these elements together, I created a married theme that links Virginia Tech, Coca-Cola and the purpose of the charity, to provide food to those in need around the world.

This was not the most rigorous of capstone projects, but it involved skills and techniques that we had been learning from the entire semester (from 2-D graphics design, to 3-D modelling and rendering).