Rebon: a brand for a product the customer does not understand
How to design a brand and a store for domestic water filtration so a layperson grasps what they are buying. From the logotype through product visuals to the design of the whole site.
Opinion · Packaging and selling
Packaging That Has to Work as a Thumbnail Too
Daniel Hauser· 4 min read
Packaging is designed for the shelf. That is how it is taught and how it is presented: a visualisation in the aisle, lighting, neighbours left and right. Except most people today see that packaging first somewhere else. As a square the width of a finger in a comparison listing, next to twenty others, on white, without any context at all.
±200 pxwidth of a listing thumbnail
1image the decision is made on
0how much of the touch survives a photo
The shelf moved, the design did not
Comparison engines have been the first contact with a brand for a long time. This year two things were added: Heureka released a browser extension that compares prices directly on top of someone else's online shop, and Seznam launched shopping with an agent on Zboží.cz that picks items and fills the cart. In both cases there is one more layer between your packaging and the customer, a layer that reads data and shows a thumbnail.
It does not mean the shelf is over. It means a design that works only in print and only close up is a design for a minority of situations.
What survives being shrunk
- The silhouette. You recognise the shape of a bottle or a tub before anything on the label. It is the one thing competitors cannot copy quickly.
- One dominant element. An illustration, a colour or a mark. Two of them merge at small size and neither is left.
- Colour coding across flavours. In a listing it is often the only thing that says this is a range and not a set of unrelated products.
- A short name at a usable size. Not the whole claim, not the weight, not every certification.
What is lost
Everything that goes through the hand and through light. Embossing, spot varnish, the texture of the paper, registration, matt against gloss. A photograph does not carry it across, and a thumbnail two centimetres wide certainly does not.
That is awkward mainly because those are exactly what one of the two directions we wrote about in Handmade vs AI-Perfect bets on. Tactile minimalism is excellent in the hand and weak in a thumbnail. That is not a reason not to do it, but it is a decision made deliberately rather than by accident.
Packaging has to win twice. Once as a square and once in the hand. Most designs only deal with the second.
The viewer is also a machine
In a comparison listing it is not only how the packaging looks that decides, but whether the data gets there at all. The main image, the title, the category and the identifier come from the product feed, and when something is missing or does not match, the product fails to join the catalogue and appears nowhere, however good the packaging is.
That is no longer a designer's job, but it belongs in the same conversation. To see what a feed is missing, the free feed check at aitoolkit.cz goes through it, and what breaks in it during expansion or a shop migration is covered in this article.
A test that takes two minutes
- Shrink the design to two centimetres wide and put it next to five competitors from the same category.
- Cover the name. Can you still tell it is your brand?
- Look at it on a phone, not on a monitor. Listings are read there.
- Try the same in greyscale. If it does not work without colour, the whole design rests on one thing.
What this means for a brief
Tell the studio where the product will be sold before anything is drawn. Packaging for your own shop with large photographs and packaging that has to succeed in a listing next to twenty others are not the same thing. The two can be reconciled, but that is a decision at the start, not an adjustment at the end.
And ask to see the design shrunk. A lit visualisation in the aisle is lovely and tells you little about how it will actually go.
