How Packaging is Designed

Warburtons marketing department brief the design company when a new design is required.

This could be for either an existing product or for a new product. This brief is also given to the packaging buyer. 

The design company will be given information such as which consumers the product is aimed at, all available information on market trends, any restrictions caused by production methods. It is essential to know how the product is perceived e.g. (for the family, traditional, up-market etc) and with this information they will produce a number of ideas which are called visuals.

These generally show the main elements of the design e.g. for a bag visual the top, base, sides of the bag and back of pack would be received. At this point a technical advisor would be contacted to obtain information which is needed.

This includes ingredients, declarations, nutrition information, bar-codes for new products, product weight and the legal name of the bread.

The packaging technologist would then decide if the design is printable. Areas that are checked include number of colours in the design and if the information will fit on the packaging.

If required, photography can be commissioned at this stage of the project.

All the information and images are then used to create the final artwork. Once approved, this artwork is passed to the ‘reproduction’ house via disc or by ISDN (telephone lines) who then develop colour separated filmwork and a colour proof.

When this proof has been checked thoroughly and approved, the filmwork is sent to the printer who will use these to produce printing plates from which the final bag/wrapper is printed.

Because quality is such an important issue to Warburtons, the colour and print quality of each and every print run of all designs are checked by the packaging department and can be rejected if found to be not up to our usual standard.