Packaging is an essential part of product sales. Lets see why Packaging and prepress are important. Structurally, packaging provides protection and ease of transportability to the product it contains. From a marketing standpoint. It provides an important messaging platform to communicate product features, brand values, and more to prospective customers. Thus a package is a 3-dimensional billboard that builds anticipation, provides information, crosses the virtual-physical barrier to be the customer’s first point of contact with the product, and in some cases even outlives the product itself to continue to build stickiness with the client and provide valuable information to the brand.
Role of Packaging
Ecommerce features allow users to zoom, rotate and even “try-on” products. Product packaging plays an important role in building affinity.
The age of eCommerce has added another important dimension to packaging. More and more people are skipping supermarkets in favor of online shopping. In the process they can spend far more time with each product, “zooming” and “rotating” high resolution images and product models in close up HD view. Consequently packaging designers have to ensure the package’s visual appeal and look & feel are able to evoke the desired sentiment (premium, innovative, environmentally conscious, decadent, etc.) in the target consumer.
The attention to detail in choice of packaging dimensions, design, look & feel. The material and sustainability signaling has to be even higher than in traditional “physical only” buying experiences. Furthermore consumers often refer to “unboxing” videos and live user experience sharing on popular social media platforms. Along with performance, comparisons and price, the reviewers, often influencers with huge numbers of subscribers often talk about the product as well as the packaging’s look & feel. As well as special attractive or helpful features of the packaging, such as its reusability, innovativeness, etc.
Packaging, Pop Culture, and the role of Prepress
Great packaging is not just structural or functionally useful, but impressive. Take the color scheme, for instance. This year’s Pantone Color of the Year is a newly created complex color called “Very Peri”. A combination of blue hues with violet and red undertones. Such a vibrant color will quite likely feature in packaging artwork for a whole range of products, from perfumes to cushions, and for a wide variety of substrates, from transparent flexible packaging for sleeves, to aluminum cans for soda. This means either printers all over the world have to formulate “Very Peri” for a wide range of substrates and textures, or packaging prepress experts have to translate “Veri Peri” to combinations of other Pantone shades.
New trends like “Color of the Year” Veri Peri tend to catch on quickly, and in most cases, pass quickly. Prepress experts offer a great way to help bring the new trend to as many products as the designer wishes, cost effectively
Prepress – A Fundamental Part of the Packaging Value Chain
The above highlights one of the key aspects of a Packaging Prepress expert’s job. Translating a designer’s artwork concept into print-ready versions is tricky work. Each printing company employs a variety of printers with different printing characteristics. Therefore producing high quality prints with consistency requires accurate directions from professionals. Who translate each pixel of the designer’s artwork into pantone shade combinations. Prepress experts also adjust the “flat” artwork into different versions for curved, flat, raised etc. surfaces and porous, non porous, metallic etc. substrates.
Pre-press “technicians” were traditionally part of a printer’s workflow. The technicians in question understood the in-house printing equipment’s settings and limitations very well and could therefore “translate” the client’s requirements into equipment and color settings that produced “close enough” work. However the new generation of Pre-press experts weren’t “technicians” but artists.
They were not only adept at the science of printing, but had a keen aesthetic sense, so understood the designer’s mindset in choosing a certain gradient, a certain texture. Some modern pre-press experts, such as Manipal Digital’s Packaging Prepress professionals distinguish themselves as a distinct skillset. Whereas designers focus on creativity and realize artwork that matches the clients’ vision, the Prepress artists understand the designers’ mindsets and faithfully produce the prepress artwork for the printers. They also understand printing technology very well, and can become consultants to the designers and clients, suggesting substrates, visual effects, textures etc. that complement the designers.
Thus the addition of the Prepress artist to the packaging design & production value chain fills an important gap. With this addition designers can focus on the “why” and “what” to create, while a printing technician can focus on the “how” to produce. The Prepress artist handles important questions of “how to create producible artwork” and “what information to provide to produce the artwork”
Conclusion
Packaging is the culmination of the efforts of a variety of artists and technicians, including designers, marketers, influencers, and manufacturers. Great packaging adds to brand value by signalling the set of values that don’t just attract, but retain customers. Choice of artwork and material either creates or destroys engagement with modern consumers that don’t just buy a product, but engage in an experience. Deep inside the workflow, somewhere between the creative superstars and the production giants sits the Packaging Prepress expert, an essential step in making the modern package techno-commercially viable.
