Designing for a brand’s product packaging can be incredibly fun and rewarding, but its complicated nature can make it difficult to get right. If you’ve ever designed a coffee bag, electronics packaging, a branded shipping box, or anything in between, you know that there are some learned tricks to getting the end-result you want with a limited amount of proofs. Fortunately for you, some of us have already learned these things the hard way, and we’re up for sharing our mistakes so that you can avoid them in your next packaging project.

Now, time to unpack the most common packaging design mistakes.

Messaging and design are like brownies and ice cream. Sure, each can be good on its own, but when you put the two together, their textures, flavors and temperatures play off each other, offering you a one-way ticket to flavor town. In short, they make each other better.

Graphic design is powerful, far beyond pretty pictures and sleek tools and techniques. When done well, graphic design can elicit feelings and emotions that draw your audience closer to your brand. Warning: We’re about to get a little touchy-feely here.

As a graphic designer, you will likely be challenged at some point in your career with creating some type of large format design. While “large format” doesn’t have a formal size definition, it’s a design that’s usually viewed from a distance and is, well, large. We’re talking billboards, trade show displays, vehicle wraps, or even custom flooring and walls. Given the massive size of these designs, the stakes are higher; the larger the design, the bigger any mistakes will appear. On top of that, large format printing is expensive. You’ll cringe at having to reprint your work because of an avoidable mishap.

This October, our team at PRIME was excited to take advantage of Adobe’s virtual design conference, Adobe MAX. With more than 350 sessions packed into just three days, it was a challenge to pick and choose which ones to tune into. Luckily, many of them are still available on-demand, so you can still catch them even if you couldn’t make it to the live-streamed event. After surveying our staff here in the office, we put together a few crowd-favorites that are not to be missed. 

No matter how brilliant or successful you are as a designer, everyone has those days – you're stuck in a rut, hitting dead ends, feeling like everything you create looks like something else you've already done, or it's just not quite right. We all need a little inspiration-on-demand from time to time. Fortunately, there are plenty of design and creativity resources on the interwebs to spark ideas and keep you moving forward toward the cutting edge. Check out some of our favorites.