Image is everything

Sometimes the product isn’t the problem why it may not be selling, it’s how the product is perceived. There is a saying “you taste with your eyes first”. I think everyone can agree that if food doesn’t look good, you are going to have a skewed opinion on how it will taste. To me, it’s the same with branding.

I was tasked to update the look of existing packaging for this building block system for young children, but I couldn’t get past the existing logo. It was just not working for me, with trying to introduce fun and bright elements to the packaging, the logo just wasn’t strong enough. It was getting lost.

The logo wasn’t strong enough because your eye didn’t know what to focus on first. There was too much color and too many elements with the same weight spread all around. So I took the basic idea of the existing logo and simplified it and gave it bold colors. I replaced the crane hook with a more fun hard hat with a cartoon style. I soften the radius edge of the sign shape and made it a solid fill. Now it could pop-off any background.

Usually you never want to use black in a young child’s product, but in this case it fit the bill perfectly in trying to make it look like a road sign and stands out because of it.

I searched for a strong but playful typeface and just skewed and rotated the letters individually just a little to emphasize “fun”. Finally, I wanted to completely contain the logo so it would work against any background and in a multitude of applications.

I quickly got a thumbs up with the new logo and then I was able to focus on making the rest of the packaging fun too.

To me, the logo is the foundation for the look of the product. When I first sat down to create this logo, I asked, what imagery do you visually connect right away in your mind when you read the words? So putting together a mood board is the first step. This will set the tone for all that follows visually. This is really my approach to most all design. I try to visually associate the most distinguishing characteristic to that item and design around it.

With the logo for “McFarlane’s Military”, I wanted to display strength first and foremost. So, I picked the word MILITARY as the point of emphasis for the logo, as that’s the most identifying word to focus on. It needed to be a bold, strong typeface. I then treated it to look like metal, that has been worn and dirtied, much like a tank after a battle. What else is military? What visual do you associate with a soldier? I looked to the uniform, and used a texture that you would find for straps, ammo packs, duffel bags, parachutes and fatigues.

I chose a stencil typeface to further the military look for the word McFARLANE’S. To add a more interesting take on the typeface, I actually made a physical stencil and sprayed painted it on a piece of canvas to add a more real-feel to it, then frayed it up to add more grit and scanned it to finalize the art in Photoshop.

Whether it was logo design, package design, photography or sculpting, being able to influence the creative direction of a product line is epitome of an artist’s objective.

THINK AGAIN

Being adaptive is just as important as being creative.

After years of designing packaging for a product one way, it was now my challenge to think about it another way. Instead of selling the normal 4 to 6 action-figures from one licensed property hanging on a peg together, McFarlane Toys was now going to offer the most popular figures from several different franchises hanging together.

This was the way of eliminating some of the lesser selling figures or “peg warmers”. McFarlane created action-figures in several categories from pop-culture, and that’s how we were planning to categorize it. I’ve always had the attitude of “here’s an opportunity to create something visually pleasing”, but now it was a harder puzzle to solve.

The packaging had to have a cohesive look through all the different licenses, while still keeping the feel of each individual brand. I decided to solve this problem by using the corner edge of the box to brand this new way of selling the figures to the consumer.

It was meant to also give the collector the “edge” in collecting. I proposed location and color as the way to brand it. As store real estate was becoming harder to come by, we were only getting 2 or 3 peg hooks to hang the figures on now, so the whole series of figures would now be mixed on the hooks.

So, I chose the top edge of the box as a strategic location in my mind to focus on. I thought the consumer could now look down the row of boxes on one peg, roughly 3-6 boxes deep on a hook to see the category color they were hunting for. Since, this was such a departure from the usual packaging design, many stakeholders had input and concerns, thus causing many redesigns. So I had to come up with several different names and different takes on the idea.

I created icons to be used in various forms for packaging, website and internal documents for quick identification. The final categories were - movies, comics, tv, anime and gaming.