Packaging is the ultimate vehicle for design: industrial, graphic, and typographic design are all put to the test to create an impression so meaningful that it converts currency into consumerism. This ...
By Ron Romanik
The Package Design Makeover Challenge is an exciting exhibition every year. Like previous years, four package design teams will be charged with redesigning packages for a real brand in the marketplace. The teams have seven full weeks to complete the challenge and submit graphic representations of the redesigned packages.
By agreeing to participate in the Makeover Challenge, the design firms also agree to let the brand owner use their ideas, if they choose, in refreshing their package designs. Here we introduce the four design firms that will participate in the challenge. In the August issue, the firms will have 2.5 pages to showcase and explain their new design execution. The design firm that is most popular with our readers will become the subject of our November Cover Story.
The best part of the Makeover Challenge is that there are practically no rules. Design teams are free to be as structurally innovative and as graphically adventurous as they wish when redesigning the packages. In each of the previous five years, this "blue sky" experiment always yields a surprising variety of brand interpretations.
EskoArtwork is this year's Makeover Challenge sponsor, and has agreed to supply the teams with a number of software tools for the duration of the Makeover Challenge. EskoArtwork has software systems, from digital asset management to 3D modeling, designed specifically for package design professionals. EskoArtwork's WebCenter, which started out as a communication platform for packaging, could be called an upstream/downstream solution. The software won an InterTech Technology Award from PIA/GATF.
Susie Stitzel, solution manager at EskoArtwork, describes it as a "blend between an approval, workflow, and asset manager." Although it does not start out with an asset library per se, the system does store projects as they are entered so that over a period of time. WebCenter holds a large store of historical data and becomes a source, as Stitzel puts it, for "rich metadata." It is an appropriate system for designers as well as prepress houses and printers.
WebCenter's Viewer component supports high-resolution approval workflows on virtually any structural and graphic design file format. Another tool in WebCenter provides accurate measurement of distances and angles, while a densitometer accurately measures each ink as well as the total ink coverage.
Did you enjoy this article? Click here to subscribe to the magazine.