Design Resource Center
Naperville, Ilinois • www.drcchicago.com

Left to right: Cristy Lane, director, strategy and client development; Traci Milner, senior designer; John Norman, principal and creative director; Eric Timm, senior designer; Renee Calabrese, production manager.

Design Resource Center (DRC) was founded in 1990 by John Norman and Chuck Bokar as a pioneering firm in high-end computer graphics for package design. Norman and Bokar were experts at a multi-computer design system known as Aesthedes because they worked for the parent company, based out of Holland, for several years prior.

After gaining experience in strategic branding and new product development, Norman and partner Chuck Bokar moved the company out of Chicago to Naperville, IL, in 1994. The firm is now an efficient team of 12 designers, account executives, traffic coordinators, and production experts.

DRC's package design methodology is customized for the clients' specific need and follows a structure emphasizing measurable progress. This includes staging presentations at key milestones —or after every step—in the process.

The firm calls their process the "Focus" steps, and it consists of five main stages: 1) Analyze; 2) Strategize; 3) Conceptualize; 4) Execute; and 5) Evaluate. The all-important first step involves a thorough investigation into retail environments and the competition to identify areas of opportunity. "We really get smart about the category," says Norman. As much as anything, this front-end work prepares the team for thoroughly understanding the category and identifying areas of opportunities to help the client differentiate within the marketplace.

Another reason that the process keeps moving along at a good clip is because of DRC's customary modus operandi with the brand owners. "The client is with us on the journey every step of the way," says Norman. He explains that this partner relationship also greatly reduces subjectivity when analyzing proposed designs. When miscommunication happens, either party can ask, for instance: "How is that off-strategy from your perspective?"

Of course, there are times when clients have ideas that DRC might disagree with. When a member of the firm feels very strongly about a specific design issue, Norman encourages the staff to tactfully but persistently "gently nudge" them in the right direction to achieve the desired result. "We're small enough still that we have a passion for what we do," Norman says. "We can still react to what our clients' needs are."

Norman always offers to have DRC take design projects all the way to printing and production. Early on, he politely suggests to clients: "Let us at least set up production standards for you." Having been in the trenches of design and production, he has seen how easily production variations can snowball out of control.

Norman sees a trend in consumer goods package design that is reducing the amount of feature copy on the front panels of packages. He admits that sometimes it is difficult to convince clients to minimize the copy in favor of a more graphically constructed message. But Norman believes this trend is here to stay. "People retain so much more visually," he emphasizes.