Package Design - May 2012 - 34

The Joy of
Special effects lend visual appeal and competitive differentiation to branded packaging and merchandise.

SFX

By Patrick Henry

hen a branded product has strong rivals in quality and performance, it’s often up to the packaging to provide the crucial point of differentiation. For many brand owners, this has made the addition of attention-getting special effects a matter of necessity. Special effects can run the gamut from hot stamping, cold foiling, metallic enhancements, and tactile inks and coatings to holography, lenticular printing, and laser cutting and etching. Ian Sunshine, sales manager at Stephen Gould Corp. (Whippany, NJ), a package-design and engineering agency, urges designers not to use special effects as a crutch for effective brand messaging or good package design. He argues that with few exceptions, the most widely used special effects for packaging are mature visual devices that have outgrown their ability to dazzle simply for being what they are. That’s why making the most of them, he says, means adding them to designs where they enhance
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the overall design strategy. Here are three examples of such successful iterations.

Metallics recharge brandmark
In 1998, Jim Pfeiffer planted his first wine grapes on a farm near Corydon, IN—a Hoosier locale, he says, that is “quite similar to the Burgundy area of France” in its suitability for wine production. Today, bottling 32 different kinds of wine, his Turtle Run Winery ranks as one of the top wineries in the region. But, sustaining its success prompted Pfeiffer to rethink the look of what he was sending to the ultra-competitive retail wine market. Pfeiffer originally devised a label that placed a turtle with a colorful mosaic shell against a black background—a design inspired, he says, by the noir style of Breyer’s Ice Cream containers. But, it soon became apparent that black couldn’t do for wine labels what it had done for ice-cream cartons. Then, Pfeiffer’s label printer, Innovative Labeling Solutions (Hamilton, OH), recommended a

Package Design - May 2012

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