Development Process – Food Packaging Before I started with anything, I thought of things that small children are attracted to, what I came up with was creating a loveable character for my new product. I came across these two cartoon cartoon characters during the process of creating Mr. Chef and they were significant inspiration to my new character.

From these inspirations, I ended up with creating this character.

I wanted to give my character a very simple name so that it would be easy for the customers to remember. Before the character was even drawn, the plan was to name him Pastar Boy, however after I created him, I realized that he is too old to be a boy so I called him Mr. Chef instead.

The original plan was to place a plate of pasta on top of Mr. Chef #1’s hand however, when I tried, the positon of his hand did not work out with the rest of the picture. Therefore, I decided to place him on top of the pasta. (The photo of the meatsauce pasta was taken by me)

Then, I moved onto making the title of the product. I thought it would be memorable if it was made of pasta so I took a picture of a penne and a bunch of spaghetti and used them as a part of the title. I chose this semi cursive font for the title because it gives an image of cheap but good Italian type food.

From then, I decided a general color to use for the background. There were so many colors that were suitable, so I narrowed it down to the three colors of the Italian flag green, white and red. White would have made my packaging look too simple and boring and red would have clashed with the color of the design on the plate, Mr. Chef’s bow and the color of the meat sauce. Due to these reasons I chose to use green.

Though I planned this to be the final step to the front cover, after I colored it green, I realized how simple and empty the cover looked. I compared this to real life food packaging, I noticed that I didn’t have a catch phrase nor the one unique thing about the cover. To gain those two components, I added a small phrase at the bottom and made a window in the box that allowed customers too see the inside of the package. Also, I added a gradient border to the

edge of the cover in order to show that it was the most important side of the package box.

*the white box in the middle of the package is a window that allows cusomers to see whats inside the box. Once its printed, the box will be cut out and a plastic film will be placed behind it.

(Hand Drawn)

On the back of the box, I decided to add instructions on how to cook the materials inside this product. Since this product includes both a set of pasta and the sauce, it was necessary to display how to cook the pasta and the sauce. To emphasize on the simplicity of making this dish, I added simple drawings on how to cook this dish along with simple instructions. On the bottom of the back cover, I

thought of creating some sort of game for the little children. At first I planned on using a cross word puzzle but later on, I realized that a maze would be entertaining for a bigger age bracket so I decided to draw one that would be appropriate for this package. Since the product is called Pastar, I drew a star shaped maze.

Looking at different real life products that has a image character on their packaging, most of them include a section that is most often called “Fun Facts About ____” Taking ideas from real life products, I decided to add a “Get to know Mr. Chef” corner too. This corner includes various facts about Mr. Chef such as his height, shoe size…

I drew the scales to show Mr. Chef’s height and shoe size.

On the other side of the box, I placed the Nutrition Fact Label and the barcode. First I tried to use the Magic Wand Tool to select all the writing from an existing Nutrition Label however, all pictures on the Internet were too small for me to select the words accurately. Therefore, I found out ways to create my own Nutrition label. And this is what I produced from scratch.

This is the Barcode I used for my package. I selected it using the Magic Wand Tool, and I added an fx, stroke tool to make the barcode blend better with the

background.

Finally, I colored the remaining bits green, and added the Title to the top.