A consumer brand that works on shelf, in hand and on screen

Overview

The Smooth Company is an Irish hair-care brand. As a freelance designer I worked on its packaging across several products. The first was a new styling cream with a very tight deadline.

The Problem

Packaging does three jobs at once: it has to stand out on a shelf, make sense in the hand and look right in a photo on a phone. Printers are unforgiving on top of that. The supplier flagged an unclear logo and asked for outlined fonts, and every product had to look like part of the same family.

What I Did, And Why

I built the styling cream pack in the brand's Pantone 573C with a black lid and a silver foil logo, and worked the brand's cloud motif into the product name. Why: the cloud is already on the hero Smooth Stick pack, so tying the new product to it made it read as part of the range.

I turned the client's changes around in hours, not days: front-of-pack hierarchy, a trademark mark after the name, cloud bullets for the ten benefits, four new icons, warnings, and the thick black line the filling machine needs. This in turn led to an overhaul of their brand guidelines.

Across the brand, I consolidated icons, text weight and fonts, including the Travel Brush and Smooth Stick. Why: shoppers read a range as a family, and mismatched icons make it look unfinished.