GOURMADE  PACKAGING DESIGNS

Gourmade is a premium frozen ready meals brand that offers quality, delicious home-cooked food 'without the faff or washing up.'

For the brief i was asked to design a generic ready-meal sleeve instead of the current 30+ bespoke sleeves for each ready-meal flavor. During my initial ideas, I noticed that the fun colourful essence of the brand would be lost if the sleeve design was generic across the whole range. I also felt it would also confuse the customer when viewing the range as a whole. After speaking with the client we agreed there could be a limited number of variable sleeve designs. I came up with the idea of having 6 ready-meal sleeves that would represent the different ranges of ready meals (Classics, Pasta, Curries, World, Sides and Desserts.) The colours were chosen to reflect the current brand palette with softened more muted colours added in. I also created unique illustrations representing the quality ingredients in the ranges, the patterns and colours would become part of the brand refresh and could also be reflected in the POS and marketing of the new packaging. 
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As the sleeves were going to be used generically for multiple products we kept the designs simple with a limited amount of information printed. I liaised with the technical team to determine all the information that was legally required on the packaging and which content could feature on the labels. During the project I worked with the packaging printers to ensure the designs met the quality expected, we had test colour runs to ensure the bright colours came out how we intended. 

Overall i really enjoyed this project, I was able to learn a lot about the print process and broaden my knowledge of colour theory. The Packaging will change with new production at HFG end of 22/23.