Overview:

The Concept Development Workflow is a foundational phase where the initial design blueprint is crafted, setting the stage for the entire packaging and branding journey. This process involves a meticulous blend of creative ideation, rigorous research, and strategic planning to ensure the packaging not only captivates but also aligns perfectly with the brand's identity and audience expectations.

Challenges:

Companies often grapple with aligning creative concepts with brand guidelines, ensuring design feasibility within production constraints, and effectively incorporating stakeholder feedback. Furthermore, understanding the target market's preferences and ensuring that the packaging stands out while complying with regulatory requirements can be a complex task.

Using ManageArtworks the entire design concept process can be mapped as a workflow within ManageArtworks. A high-level workflow may look something like this

Design brief – setting out the goals and strategy of your packaging design
Research phase – learning about the market or users you’re designing packaging for
Concept development – brainstorming ideas for your packaging design, polishing and refining your ideas
Design review – getting feedback on your packaging design ideas
Concept refinement – improving your designs and collecting more feedback
Concept approval – getting sign-off from your stakeholders

Throughout the process, users within the company and the design agency can collaborate using the ManageArtworks tools. The Brief can be captured in a structured way as an online form, while the design concepts can be uploaded, viewed and annotated by all stakeholders. Feedback collected on the designs is instantly available to the agency to refine the design concepts. The concept approval can be done digitally online, and the final design concept files pushed into the DAM for future use.

Seamless collaboration: ManageArtworks ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page by bringing together internal and external teams on the same platform. The workflow drives the flow of tasks and provides real-time visibility to all stakeholders.
Informed creative decisions: With all data and files in one place, stakeholders can make informed decisions and have a record of reasons why a certain concept was chosen or not chosen.
Repository of concepts: ManageArtworks DAM becomes the central repository for all the concept related assets (brief, preliminary design concepts, final design concepts, logos, fonts, graphics, color, etc.). These assets can be instantly retrieved at any time in the future and shared with packaging artwork designers and pre-press agencies.

This example of a Trident Xtra Care packet was first place winner in the student category of the 2015 Dieline awards and garnered some very positive attention for designer Hani Douaji.  It takes a familiar product and reimagines it in a fun way that is sure to win a second glance from consumers as they browse the shelves in the checkout lane.
This design concept is minimalistic, fun and, most importantly, does a good job of housing the product. It highlights the product - it’s often easy to forget that what makes packaging great is that it makes the product its centerpiece.

With a redesign that resulted in a sales increase of 1000% , Nathan Frank, Founder of Help Remedies, had this to say about the work, “Pearlfisher has done a great job in enhancing our identity so that it communicates everything we have to say without spelling it out, literally.”
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The colourful packs feature a simple concept that revolves around a specific problem. Taking care of your health can feel stressful and scary. Help Remedies wanted to eliminate that feeling and empower you to make your own health decisions through simpler language and simpler medicine. Besides having a simple and clean design, the packaging itself was done with sustainability in mind.