Packaging

Although I enjoy every aspect of design, my personal speciality is multilingual food packaging, which incorporates three of my favourite things: design, food and languages. My packaging work has mainly been agency based and examples of these can therefore not be shown in this portfolio. It has included major supermarket and food brands, which has also covered freelance artworking (on and off site) to provide modifications, updates and implementation of existing company’s designs. Please feel free to contact me for further details.

I’ve worked on a large variety of food packaging in the past seven years, ranging from simple boxes (for cereals, desserts, teas, etc) to more complex outer cases with overlapping parts – I think my passion for origami as a child came in handy here! I’ve also worked on crisp bags, yogurt pots and lids, drink cans, vegetable bags, as well as sleeves and labels for just about any food imaginable. Many of these were multilingual, with languages most commonly including English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Greek, but also Eastern European languages including Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Hungarian, Croatian, Romanian and Bulgarian. I very much enjoy working with languages and I am currently learning more about Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Greek and Russian/Cyrillic writing systems, which can aid multilingual proofreading and checking.

This experience has taught me to work successfully within tight deadlines and deal with time pressure, and I’ve been able to use my keen eye for detail to ensure accuracy and range consistency. I’ve also learned a lot about spot colour use and print finishing processes such as embossing, varnishing, lamination and spot UV, which is regularly used on packaging. I have a good eye for seeing where certain design elements need to be positioned by looking at a flat cutter guide, and I also like to do mockups to check the design lines up on all sides. Quite often, a lot of information has to be crammed in a very small space, and making it fit brings out the perfectionist in me.