Algeria AgencyBranding & design
Packaging: what reads at a metre
Packaging is judged at a metre, beside a competitor. Three things get through at that distance; everything else waits to be picked up.
The article on the branding pillar sets the scene: packaging is judged on a shelf, at a metre, beside a competitor you did not choose. This page starts there and goes down into the mechanics.
Those mechanics are not graphic. Packaging is designed on a die line supplied by the converter, it is folded, glued, run through a machine, stacked, dusted, and scanned by a till that does not belong to you.
Each of those stages takes something away from what you drew. The fold eats a panel, the glue covers another, the substrate changes the colour, handling wears off the varnish, and a badly placed code does not read.
This article handles those constraints in the order they arrive, and it starts with the number that decides everything and that nobody publishes: the minimum quantity your converter will produce.
Judged at a metre, beside a competitor
The scene is always the same and it is not favourable. Somebody walks past a shelf, at a metre, moving, with four other products of the same type in view. You have a second and a half and a third of their attention.
At that distance most of what is printed does not exist. Text below a few millimetres is a grey texture; gradients read as a smudge; detailed photographs become an average colour.
What gets through is short: a shape, a dominant colour, one word. That is why packaging that works often looks too simple on a computer screen, where it is seen at thirty centimetres and enlarged.
The check is mechanical and nobody does it: print the mock-up at real size, stick it on a box, put it on a shelf beside three real competitors, and step back a metre. What stays readable is your packaging; the rest is decoration.
The corollary, unwelcome to a designer: the shelf is not a white background. Your colour will be seen next to the neighbours’, and a colour resembling the category leader’s hides you in it rather than bringing you closer to it.
Three things at a metre, the rest at thirty centimetres
A pack’s hierarchy is decided by reading distance, and there are only two distances. At a metre, three things get through. At thirty centimetres, once the person has picked the product up, everything else becomes readable.
The three from far away are nearly always: what it is — the category, in one word — who makes it, and which variant it is. In that order of importance, not the reverse, which is the order most brands apply.
The commonest error is giving first place to the brand name on a product nobody knows. A buyer is not looking for your name; they are looking for fine couscous, black soap, olive oil. The name becomes the priority once it is already known, not before.
Everything else belongs to close reading: the composition, the weight, the origin, the instructions, the mandatory declarations, the contact. The article on the food and drink sector describes what regulation requires there, and that is not this page’s subject.
The layout consequence is that a pack has two superimposed compositions, not one. They are designed separately and checked separately — one at a metre, one in the hand — and a pack with only one composition always misses one of them.
The number that decides is published nowhere
Before any drawing, a packaging project is decided by a number: the minimum quantity the converter will produce. It governs the unit price, the number of variants possible, and the cost of the smallest change.
We will not publish that number, and the reason differs from the ones given elsewhere in this series. It is not a foreign or unverifiable figure: there is simply no published series. It is set by quotation, it depends on the substrate, the machine and the season, and it varies between converters in the same district.
An order of magnitude printed here would therefore be wrong for nearly every reader, and it would serve as a reference in discussions where it has no business being. That is exactly the use this house refuses a figure.
What replaces the figure is three phone calls. Ask three converters for the minimum quantity on the intended substrate, the price at that quantity, the price at double, and the lead time. One morning, and you have the only number that matters: yours.
That number then changes the whole project. A high minimum means every variant is a stock commitment, that the number of references has to be reduced, and that a text correction is paid for in discarded packaging. That is why section 7 exists.
The die line comes from the converter
Packaging is not designed on a page: it is designed on a die line, the flat plan of the shape cut, folded and glued. That plan belongs to the converter, it matches their tooling, and it is not invented.
The first question to ask before any mock-up is therefore: do you have an existing die line that suits, and can you send it? An existing cutting tool costs nothing; a new one costs a great deal and adds weeks.
That means part of the shape decisions are already taken before you start, and it is good news. Choosing from the shapes the converter already knows how to produce eliminates a whole category of unpleasant surprises.
Working without a die line always produces the same incident: the mock-up is approved, the converter transfers it onto their plan, and elements land across a fold or under a flap. The corrections then happen in a hurry and without the designer.
Ask for the substrate’s direction as well. Board has a grain direction and film has an unwind direction; a pattern drawn without accounting for it can end up rotated ninety degrees on the machine, and nobody finds out before the first copies.
What disappears in the fold and under the glue
On a flat die line all the panels are equal. On the formed box they are not equal at all: some are never seen, one is covered by the glue flap, and two are crushed by the fold.
The panels never to use for important information are the flap and the base. The first is glued under another; the second sits on the shelf. A regulatory text placed there is a text that is absent.
Folds eat material. A fold is not a line: it is a zone of one to three millimetres where printing distorts, cracks on dark solids, and becomes unreadable. No text crosses a fold, ever.
The safety-zone rule from the print design article applies here more severely: three millimetres from the cut edge, but also from every fold, every perforation and every glue area. On a small box that removes a considerable share of the usable surface.
Finally, it has to be decided which panel is the face. On a shelf a product is placed one way round, and the front is the one the retailer turns towards the aisle — or the one they turn at random. Packaging where two adjacent faces work is packaging that survives careless stocking.
The substrate changes everything
The same drawing printed on solid board, on corrugated board, on plastic film or on a self-adhesive label gives four different results, and the printing process is not the same either.
Solid board accepts fineness: small text, thin lines, images. Corrugated does not: the surface is uneven, the flutes show through, and small characters fill in. A drawing made for the first fails on the second.
Flexible film raises a background problem: it is often transparent or metallised, and a colour printed on it mixes with what is behind. A white backing then has to be printed under the coloured areas, which is a technical decision taken while drawing rather than afterwards.
Processes also differ in how many colours they accept economically. A separate-ink process gives a perfectly stable flat colour and costs a lot per additional colour; a digital one accepts anything and suits short runs. The choice decides what the drawing can afford.
What we take from that as method: substrate and process are chosen before drawing, with the converter, and the mock-up is designed for them. The reverse — draw, then look for who can produce it — is the most reliable way to get a quotation three times the budget.
The barcode is read by somebody else’s till
It is the only element on a pack read by a machine, and that machine belongs to the retailer. When it fails, it is not you who loses time: it is the cashier, in front of a queue, and that is how a product becomes tiresome to stock.
Three design errors make it unreadable, and all three are frequent. Excessive reduction, when it is felt to be too visible and shrunk beyond what the reader accepts. Inversion, when the bars are light on a dark ground — a reader looks for dark bars on a light ground.
The third is the quiet zone: the white margin to the left and right of the symbol, which is part of the code. A graphic element encroaching on it, or a background colour filling it, makes the symbol unreadable even when it is perfectly printed.
Two substrate constraints are added. On flexible film, a code placed where the material creases will not read; it needs a flat area. And on glossy packaging, reflection alone can prevent reading, which is corrected with a local matt varnish.
The check is simple and nobody does it before the run: have a proof printed, and have it scanned by a real till reader, not by a phone. A phone corrects many faults a laser reader does not.
The range: what breaks at the fourth flavour
A brand starts with two or three references and ends up with eleven. The graphic system designed for three nearly always breaks at the fourth, and the moment it breaks is predictable.
The mechanism is simple: the variant is signalled by colour, and colours that are distinct and readable at a metre are not numerous. By the sixth flavour two neighbouring greens are in use, and the customer picks up the wrong product — which produces a return and an irritation that are not attributed to you.
The system that holds rests on two levels: a constant element saying the brand and the category, identical across the range, and a variable element saying the variant. The variant is then expressed by a readable word plus a colour, never by a colour alone.
Formats have to be anticipated too. The same product often exists in small, family and three-pack, and a composition tuned to one proportion distorts on the other two. A range system is drawn on three formats from the start, not on one.
The design rule we apply: draw the system assuming eight references, even if you launch three. It is a free constraint while drawing and an unpayable one two years later, because redoing a system means throwing away the stock of every existing pack.
The carton the retailer opens
There is one pack nobody designs and the retailer sees first: the outer carton. It is what arrives on the loading bay, gets stacked in the stockroom, opened with a knife, and sometimes put straight onto the shelf.
What it has to carry is short and nearly always missing: the product name and variant, the quantity inside, the date, the stacking direction, and an image of the product readable from a distance. A plain brown carton has to be opened to find out what is in it.
There is a case where it becomes a display: packs designed to be opened at the top and placed directly on the shelf. That is a handling saving for the retailer, so a listing argument for you, and it costs a pre-cut.
Stacking direction deserves a mention because its absence is expensive. A carton stacked the wrong way crushes the products beneath, and an arrow printed on two faces avoids breakage you will be held responsible for.
Finally, the quantity per carton is a commercial decision disguised as a logistics one. Too high and a small shop cannot list the product; too low and it multiplies handling. It is decided by asking three retailers what they usually take.
What the packaging goes through
A pack passes through a warehouse, a lorry, a stockroom and a shelf before being seen, and each of those stages degrades it in a predictable way. Designing without allowing for that amounts to judging the product on the day it leaves the factory.
Dust and abrasion take the gloss varnishes and foils first. Packaging that shines in a photograph goes dull and scratched within three weeks on a shelf, and the contrast between the copies at the back and those at the front shows.
Sunlight fades, and it fades unevenly: reds and violets go first. A product displayed in a window or near a glass door can change colour within a month, and that is the copy passers-by see.
Stacking crushes corners and opens glued seams. Board that is too thin looks economical on the quotation and deforms in the stack, producing a shelf that looks neglected through no fault of the retailer’s.
And cold, for anything going into a refrigerator: condensation lifts poorly glued labels and warps untreated board. That is a question to put to the converter before choosing the substrate, not after the first summer.
Two languages on one panel
Packaging sold here carries Arabic, and often French, on a surface that was not planned for two. It is a constraint of space as much as of design, and it is solved by hierarchy rather than by symmetry.
The solution that fails is the mirror: the same block translated, aligned opposite, at the same size. It doubles the volume of text, it occupies the surface the metre-distance reading needed, and it produces two compositions that get in each other’s way.
The solution that works is separating by panel rather than by column. The front carries the metre-distance reading in one dominant language; the back carries the detailed declarations in both. Somebody reading closely turns the product, which they do anyway.
Mandatory declarations follow regulation rather than design, and the article on the food and drink sector describes what it requires — including on language. This page says only that the space has to be reserved before drawing, not taken back afterwards.
One recurring technical point: numerals and units do not flip. A weight, a volume, a durability date and a code read in the same direction in both languages, and the article on interface design describes the same problem on a different surface.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: drawing packaging without the die line of the converter who will produce it. A mock-up made on a generic plan transfers badly, and the corrections then happen in a hurry, without us and without you.
We will refuse to approve a colour on screen for packaging. Colour is approved on the real substrate, printed by the real process, and that proof costs money and time — it is the one expense on this project we do not argue about.
We will refuse to design a range system on three references without checking it at eight. A system that breaks at the fourth flavour forces the whole range to be redone, and therefore the stock to be scrapped, and it is the most expensive error on this page.
What we do: section 2’s three phone calls before any drawing; the die line and substrate direction obtained from the converter; the mock-up printed at real size and placed on a shelf a metre from three competitors; the barcode tested with a real reader; and the outer carton designed like the rest.
And what you can do this week without us: print your current packaging at real size, stick it on a box, put it on a shelf beside three competitors and step back a metre. Note what you can still read. That list is your real packaging, and it is often shorter than expected.
Frequently asked questions
How many units should we order?
There is no general answer: the minimum is set by quotation and depends on the substrate, the machine and the converter. Call three converters and ask for the minimum, the price at it, the price at double, and the lead time.
What has to read at a metre?
Three things: what it is, who makes it, and which variant. In that order — the brand name comes first only once it is already known. Everything else belongs to reading at thirty centimetres, product in hand.
Can the pack be designed before choosing a converter?
No. The die line, the substrate direction and the process come from them and decide what the drawing can afford. Drawing first is the most reliable way to get a quotation far above budget.
Why does our barcode not scan?
Nearly always for three reasons: reduced beyond the limit, printed light on a dark ground, or with its side quiet zone filled by a graphic element. Have a proof tested by a real till reader, not by a phone.
How do we handle a range of several flavours?
With a constant element saying the brand and category, and a variable one saying the variant by a word plus a colour — never by colour alone. And draw the system assuming eight references even if you launch three.
Should both languages sit side by side?
No: separate by panel rather than by column. The front carries the metre-distance reading, the back carries the detailed declarations in both. Reserve that space before drawing, and see the food and drink article for what is mandatory.
Where we come in
Two or three things survive a step backwards, and that is the whole message. A shelf then adds a constraint the table test never shows.
- We run the test again on a real shelf, in three shops, at the busy hour.
- We get the minimum runs out of your manufacturers before any file is opened.
- We hand back a three-level hierarchy: read across the aisle, read in the hand, read at home.
If your three pieces of information already carry, do not redraw anything: changing the shape restarts minimums you paid for once.
Read next
Having packaging made: from quotation to the first pallet
The artwork is finished; it still has to be produced. Quotations, plates, the proof, checking the pallet: the order of the steps, and what costs money to change too late.Food and drink: the label is your first page
Your buyer reads you holding the product, on a shelf, in eight seconds. The website comes a long way after.The print run: ordering packaging without paying for it twice
Packaging is corrected before the press and never after. Here is the order of decisions, from the quote to the reversed calendar.
Let us talk about your project
A free audit, no commitment: we look at your online presence and tell you what is holding it back.