Welcome to 2012 and to the future — a brand new year with brand new technology and brand new kinetic energy, optimism and potential. Launching into the new year gets me thinking about the future and what’s to come in 2012. I get asked a lot, “What does the future of package design look like?” … and my answer is that the future of the packaged product is what I call power-modernism — bold, powerful typography — crystal-clear communication — beautiful, groundbreaking design. Power-modernism uses a new visual vocabulary and takes us head-first into 2012.
Power-modernism focuses, excites, and innovates its message. It steers clear of anything extra, dated, busy or confusing. Power-modernism is always strong, powerful, sophisticated and bold — it balances strong modern typography with an acute sensitivity for design: aesthetics, balance, harmony and open-space, combining powerful communication and imagery that’s never cluttered or too complicated or busy to understand immediately. Power-modernism has the innate ability to set a product apart — to cut through the clutter and cut to the front of the line.
The future means we’ll all have less and less time, less patience, less energy to figure out what the heck a product does. Confuse a customer and lose a customer. Speak to a customer’s needs and win the grand prize — customer loyalty and more facebook ‘likes’ than you’ll know what to do with. As technology speeds us faster and faster, the distractions mount, the competition piles on. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.
Take a look at these examples of packaged goods that exemplify power-modernism—package design that has the power to make you stop, look, read… and buy.
Less is so much more. No-nonsense Spanish chocolate. What could be more simple? A big and bad font (Dim Bold), color-coding… and a spot-on rectangular logo with a bite out of it. What more do you need for an elegant solution? It’s essentially generic packaging that’s solved how to look not even remotely cheap.
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(Packaging for Chocolate Factory, Ruiz+Company, Barcelona)
Sex Sells. Upper-case Franklin Gothic on naked skin— how better to show that’s what inside the package is completely unprocessed and organic? Here you get a powerful balance of sexuality, communication, and of course, exquisite form following function.
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(Extravirgin Olive Oil, Bergman Associates/Mpakt, NYC)
So, how can your brand be power-modern? It would be nice if there was a DIY solution… but there isn’t. You have to hire a package design firm that knows how to speak the complex language of our modern times — knows how to control type into loud resonating consumer messaging — knows how to make a package “yell beautifully.” If you discover that their work is even remotely ‘retro’, old fashioned – or looking like the 50s, 60s, 80s or 90s… run the other way, fast. What you need is a design firm that walks that bold line called power-modernism.