It’s nearly year-twelve of the new millennium and technology is speeding ahead, consumers are racing to keep up, and the market is tagging-along to keep up with all of it. ‘What’s new’ is ‘what’s old’ quicker than ever and factoring-in the amped-up volume of competition makes survival of the fittest product even more challenging. In today’s market, we have a split-second to grab a customer’s attention – after that, they’re on to something new. To be successful, a product has to make a consumer stop and look – and go closer to read and buy. It has to speak with a powerful, clear, and simultaneously attractive voice. So how does a product see overwhelming success in this brave new world? The answer’s in the design – design that speaks to the times.
Essentially, what’s making or breaking product success in today’s market are its aesthetics and communication – the design of “the package.” Dieter Rams, the design genius behind Braun’s revolutionary products from the 60s and 70s, said, “good design helps a product to be understood,” but in this new millennium, the rules have changed and all bets are off. Having a product be understood was good enough in the last century, but in this new one, to be simply understood isn’t nearly enough. In today’s market, what doesn’t speak up and stand out is left behind and forgotten. The language that a product speaks has to be crystal clear, finely tuned, and have a beautiful voice that people want to hear – it has to speak with a new visual vocabulary.
That new vocabulary uses typography, imagery, color, and form to communicate in ever new and groundbreaking ways: focusing, exciting, and innovating the message. It steers clear of anything extra, dated, busy, or confusing. The look is always strong, powerful, sophisticated, and bold – essentially, power-modernism for the twenty-first century. Power-modernism precisely balances bold, strong, modern typography with sensitivity for design: aesthetics, balance, harmony, and open-space – and sometimes combining powerful imagery (photography or illustration) in a way that is never cluttered or too busy to understand immediately.
The beauty-product industry is a never-ending cycle of constant launches and promotions, where product successes and failures are clocked by the hour. As part of my work, I meet on a daily basis with marketing teams in the world’s biggest beauty companies to get briefed on new packaging projects and to modernize existing ones. It’s becoming more and more common to be briefed on packaging a new product and then watch market and competitive changes alter the project’s brief constantly during the design process. It forces you to react quickly because the future is now – and you’d better be ready for what’s coming next. One week, a product has to be a certain color, and the next week, that color is wrong. One week, one product benefit is important to communicate, and the next, it’s another one. This creates an exciting environment to polish and perfect the ‘recipe’ of power-modernism and a micro-climate ripe with potential wisdom that can be then applied to all markets.
All you have to do is a little surfing online to see the incredible increase in velocity of evolution in the global market – and to be successful, packaging design has to evolve at that same speed. Simply put, products need to cut through the clutter like never before, and the need for power-modernist packaging that makes a consumer stop and take notice has never been greater.