BBC's High Street Dreams

[Dave1975]

Has anyone been watching the new BBC series 'High Street Dreams'?

It's more business orietanted than design, but it does include quite a lot of focus on product design, branding and packaging. The first episode was focusing on new food products, one of which was a hot chilli sauce, and Pearlfisher did a complete rebrand for the sauce which I thought was really, really nice :up:

That particular example was featured on TheDieline too;
Before & After: Mr. Singh's Chilli Sauce - TheDieline.com: Package Design

If you're interested in the business side of products going from small homemade products to main stream retail it's a really interesting show, not sure when it's actually on but I've been watching them on iPlayer.

Anyone else been watching?

 

[Russell]

Missed the first one but will have to see if it is on iPlayer. Love PearlFishers work thats quite a dramatic before and after!

Watched the one on Monday with the 'Den Kit' but was literally shouting at the tele when they showed the packaging concept for that. Looked nice graphically but had unreadable sublines, no product pictures, images kids using it etc, but looking on the Entertainers website all of this has now been addressed. Good show to watch from a design perspective.

 

[Dave1975]

Yeah likewise with the Den Kit, I wondered why they didn't use an agency, or the designer didn't produce several concepts like they'd done in the first episode? After how long they discussed the importance of the packaging communicating the box contents, and then just listing the contents on the back with no photos! Head + brick wall moment?

I liked the way they showed the designer pulling their original packaging design apart for the Nutritional milk product, with the crazy scientist cow! Despite feeling a little sorry for them, it was entertaining, and they took it the right way

Think it's worth watching just for the small section of packaging design they show, I'd love to get involved in some packaging design.

 

[Russell]

I liked the way they showed the designer pulling their original packaging design apart for the Nutritional milk product, with the crazy scientist cow! Despite feeling a little sorry for them, it was entertaining, and they took it the right way

Yep that was good, the original did look like the Munch Bunch Cow cooking up Crystal Meth, didn't exactly scream a healthy/ natural product. It's interesting how 'Innocent' have completely redefined the visual language for that kind of market, as shown in the agencies redesign concepts.

 

[Dave1975]

Yes it is, it used to be about cramming images into the packaging, the bigger and brighter the better, a lot of modern packaging seems to follow that simplistic, stripped back style that innocent have really become known for.

 

[Russell]

Uncoated label stock & Neutral/ Cream coloured backgrounds are everywhere. Would love to do more packaging work, have had a few enquires in the last year or so but all new start ups with very little business sense and no workable budget for packaging.

 

[Dave1975]

Would love to do more packaging work, have had a few enquires in the last year or so

Was your Bench project just concepts, or did it go any further?
Remember being impressed with those when you first joined DF (nod)

 

[Russell]

No further than concepts, the company I worked for at the time were pitching for the manufacturing licence so the packaging ideas were part of the pitch but didn't go any further. Done some medical packaging recently but that's quite a restrictive, fair amount of legal requirements.