Elevate Your Brand or Etsy Shop Through Packaging Design

Hello everyone welcome to my latest class. I’m Jen Lezan and I’ll be your teacher for this course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. You may know me from my previous courses on Arbington or from my YouTube channel: The Freelance Life where I share behind the scenes of tuning my creative business as well as creative design and art tutorials. In addition to my creative work, I’ve been teaching as an adjunct professor in higher ed for nearly 10 years. I often teach marketing and design courses and I wanted to bring another one of my favorite courses: Packaging Design to the digital space for small business owners who are looking to bring their branding to the next level with packaging design. This will is the second class in a 2 part series dedicated to branding. If you have not taken the first one and need to create a logo for use in this class - please make sure you check out:  The basics of Branding and Logo design Using Open Source Assets in Affinity Designer for Small Businesses

What you will learn

In this course, we are going to be building on establishing our brand identity through a packaging suite. Before we do any designing we will be re-capping branding identity and how it is applied in packaging design. We will also discuss the evolution of packaging and how it is now used to implement branding for companies and we will further explore the design process as it applies to packaging design. 

We will discuss the importance of research and how it can impact the direction of packaging design as well as the packaging design essential criteria - which is a starting point and foundation for strong packaging design. Finally, we will take what we learned and apply to a project.  We will be creating packaging elements for use in shipping small products for something like an Etsy shop. We will be working in Affinity Designer to build out our elements in the software. 

Who this class is catered to: 

This class is catered to the beginner designers or small business owners who are looking to create a packaging suite. We will be going over some basics and theory in packaging design that will help familiarize you with the industry. Some knowledge in Affinity Designer will be helpful, but I’ll be sure to walk you through the basics of understanding the tools we will be working to create your packaging elements.  

Project Scope: 

For our class project, you will be designing packaging suite. Specifically,  we are going to design some product shipping packaging for an Etsy shop - you can adjust the project to your needs, but for ease of the process I will be creating the following using a logo and pre-made artwork for my own shop. You can check out some inspiration on my Packaging Pinterest Board: https://pin.it/5JnPvUw

Project Deliverables:

Etsy Shop Header

Thank you stickers

Happy Mail Stickers

Thank You Card

Product Label 

Make sure you take a screenshot or export your file as a JPEG to upload to the class project gallery. 

The tools you will need to complete todays project include

Laptop or computer with affinity designer installed 

Access to the internet

Your brand logo 

Any artwork associate with your brand that you might like to use 

I am looking forward to creating with you today, let’s get started.

Feel free to download the Brand Guide template (Affinity Designer File) as well as the website list that I mention in this course for some additional packaging inspiration!