Senior Capstone Project

[Amanda10990]

Hello!
I am a senior in college and I am working on my final project. I love designing packaging, and I decided to design some packaging for art supplies for my project. I seem to really be struggling with this project though, and I've looked at so many different types of packaging and package design blogs and I just can't seem to find any inspiration and I'm struggling creatively. These are some designs that I have been able to come up with though, and I was wondering if anyone would be willing to give me some helpful feedback and tips so I can take my project to the next level (and so it doesn't look so awful). Any help would be greatly appreciated! Anyways, these are labels for colored pencils, graphite pencils, and blending stumps. The pencils will be placed in cylindrical tin containers and the stumps will be in a tin container that is kind of like the size and shape of an Altoids tin. I prefer working in Illustrator rather than in Photoshop and I really like working with geometric shapes. I'm just wondering how I can improve this project and get it out of the rut that it's in and if I can even work with these designs. Thank you!

 

[scotty]

Welcome to DF Amanda.

I like where you've gone with this and especially the poly effect on the pencils.

One thing that I'd suggest is that you use your tones to create a kind of shading to the pencils themselves to give them some depth if you get my drift.
Try to think where your light source is coming from, say right to left and stick with that for them all.
Have the tones on the left darker to those on the right.

Another thing you could try is to take away some of that uniform quality from the coloured part of the pencil.
Maybe keep the centre line but make the geometry more random as I'm seeing a sideways Union Flag but that might be just me.