When designing your product’s packaging, you need to ask yourself three questions before committing to a particular design: Is the packaging safe? Is the labeling honest? And does it catch the eye? If you find that any of those aspects are deficient, then you need to consider these tips for better packaging design.

Safe Packaging

You need to make sure that you put measures in place to keep your product safe for consumers—for example, safety caps to keep anything harmful from getting into a beverage, or packaging that cannot be accidentally opened or pierced if your product itself can be harmful to customers if exposed to it. You’ll also want to ensure your packaging keeps your product from breaking inside the package. Examples like these illustrate the harm that can result from faulty packaging.

Honesty in Advertisement

Do not make promises that you know your product cannot keep. Exaggerating the abilities of your product may help in the short term, but customer dissatisfaction will quickly spread. Through word of mouth and poor online reviews, this type of exposure can harm your brand and negatively affect current and future products you sell. Highlight your product’s qualities on the packaging so that customers will have accurate expectations. Honesty alone can lead to better packaging design.

Artistic Design

Possibly the most subjective of the design principles, artistic design is arguably the most important when it comes to selling your product. Creating an eye-catching package that stands out from competing brands can be a difficult task. Make sure that the colors complement one another well and generate consumer interest.

Sometimes overlooked, the importance of typography cannot be overstated. Ensuring that the lettering is both readable for any customer and artistically designed in a way to fit with the whole of the packaging design is a difficult yet necessary obstacle to overcome.

User-Friendly

As mentioned previously, it is important to keep your product secure from harmful substances for the sake of the consumer. But it is also necessary to make sure that whoever buys your product can easily access it when they need to. Too many unnecessary security precautions or design flaws can make your product inconvenient for consumers, motivating them to select a different product the next time they shop. The item should be easy to open and free of faults that interfere with its opening mechanisms.

From improved security measures to a change of colors, investing in your product’s design can set it up for success when it is on the shelf and in the hands of the consumer.

Infographic created by Chicago Tag & Label, a custom label manufacturer