Design Evaluation

I was excited to do this assignment because my father works in advertising, mostly in the packaging aspect. Him and I would have discussions on what I thought about projects he was working on and he would explain to me about the design. From then on I would catch myself watching TV or walking around a grocery store and critiquing what I saw.  Was it good advertising? Did it make sense? WHAT in the world were they trying to sell (cough cough, Carl's Jr...)? I chose to look at honey jars because my husband LOVES honey. So much that his grandmother would give him a giant container as a gift and when he would run out he would be given more, my real life Winnie the Pooh. For this assignment I was drawn to the packaging of these products for obvious reasons that you will see below.

THE GOOD

Here we can see the idea behind the BZZZ Packaging Design.

Backbone Branding created this packaging and as you can see is very fun and creative. What the design team said about this was, "nothing can be more compelling than design inspired by nature". You are getting more than just honey in a jar, you are getting the whole experience. There are several pieces of smoothly sanded wood that when combined creates a visually appealing case to hold the honey. Going along with their "inspired by nature" theme, they have left the wood with a natural color, not stained. Also they are wanting to portray that the honey is all natural and raw, so what better way to show this then to have the jar in what honey comes from, a beehive. I also like that they kept the design of the name very simple. It adds to the theme and the combination of everything is very pleasing to the eye. The design team wanted the customer to feel that you were taking the hive straight from the tree, minus all the BZZZ. You can see most of the Gestalt Principles in this design piece. As I was going through each principles I was having a hard time not applying all of them. The Law of Pragnanz or simplicity is an obvious one. When looking at it, you reduce it to it's simplest form, which is a hive. Other Principles would be the Law of Proximity and Law of Similarity. When the pieces of wood are group together, you can see it as the whole form. Even when the wood pieces are apart, as you are unveiling the honey jar, you still group it together as a whole.

THE BAD

I don't know where to start on this design. First off the different fonts... not okay. I don't know where to look first. The only reason why I know that this is HONEY is because of the bold word. Now where to look after that. Everything just blends together, there is no separation. It was nice that they added some variety with the slanting brand name, but still. The bright yellow and red definitely were the wrong hues of the colors chosen. It almost hurts my eyes to look at it too long, for multiple reasons. The jar itself doesn't have a lot of design to it. When I first saw it I thought it was a pickle or olive jar and probably would have kept thinking that if it wasn't for the giant word HONEY across the front.