Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

By Ron Romanik

Parham Santana may have perfected the art of the style guide. When Walmart Stores Inc. approached the New York City-based firm to rethink the packaging for their extensive Holiday Time portfolio, Parham Santana delivered an allencompassing and versatile style guide in just 80 pages.

Maruchi Santana, executive creative director at Parham Santana, explains that an effective style guide should be intuitive and easy-to-implement for the end-user merchants, whose time is valuable. “We can do two or three packages, and with effective guidelines, users can roll out the whole program,” says Santana. Luca Torregiani, Parham Santana’s art director on the Holiday Time project, is proud of how accessible the Holiday Time style guide is. The style guide has minimal text to let the graphics and illustrations explain the key parameters of the packaging campaign. “It’s not intimidating at all,” says Torregiani. “The challenge is to make a system that speaks to the brand but is also flexible.”

Everything in its place
The fact that purchasers of holiday decorations are predominantly fed into Walmart’s interest in making the Holiday Time area a “destination” shopping experience. The female element also fed into Parham Santana’s deep knowledge of how to connect with women shoppers.
Walmart outlined 12 packaging campaign goals in the brief they delivered to Parham Santana. Besides being clean, modern, and not trendy, the campaign was to structure an easy-to-implement format that communicated benefits clearly to shoppers. Torregiani explains that the consistent information box format could be compared to the reassuring organization found with a desk drawer divider. The grid feel helps shoppers locate the information most pertinent to their purchase decision.

“Every space had a specific purpose and information,” explains Torregiani. The style guide indicates exactly what the parameters are for the size of the information box, the hierarchy of information, and the relationship between type sizes. Parham Santana develop a singular color strategy for the brand that, if needed, could easily be changed in the future with one simple color swap while maintaining the system’s overall look. The combination of greens with a highlight of cream help to inspire shoppers in a seasonal destination area inside the store.