Where your pack is actually seen
For a D2C brand, the first meeting between customer and pack is a 400-pixel image in a grid of competitors, on a phone, at speed.
That is a completely different design problem from a supermarket shelf, and most packaging briefs still describe the shelf.
The thumbnail test
Export your design at 400px wide. Put it in a grid with six competitors. From arm's length, can you tell what the product is and whose it is in under a second?
If you cannot, no amount of foiling saves it. This one test kills more concepts in our studio than any other piece of feedback.
What survives compression
High-contrast type, a single dominant colour field, and one strong silhouette survive. Delicate serif secondary text, subtle gradients and fine linework do not.
Design the hierarchy for the thumbnail, then add the craft layer for the in-hand experience. That order matters — doing it the other way round produces packs that photograph beautifully and sell badly.
Print reality
Get dielines from your printer before the design starts, not after. Ask about substrate and print method in the first week.
Matte lamination eats about 8% of your colour saturation. Kraft substrates shift everything warm. Neither is a problem if you knew before you designed; both are expensive if you found out at proof stage.
If any of this is a live problem rather than an interesting read, say so. We would rather have a specific conversation than a general one.
— Sayan Saha, Founder
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