Advanced Packaging Design Class

learn packaging and product design online

Advanced Packaging Design In this class, you'll learn how to create packaging designs. You'll learn how to design packages for a wide variety of projects, clients, and customers. Class concepts include seeing and designing in three dimensions, mass vs. prestige design, designing for target markets, playful design, product lines, and new product launches.

Portfolio projects include the designing of pizza store boxes, champagne bottles, fragrance cartons, and more. This class is geared to students interested in product packaging and creating portfolio-quality design work.

Recommended Links:

1. Packaging Design course syllabus

2. Beginner to advanced Graphic Design classes

3. questions? chat with admissions advisor

Class Projects and Objectives:

This online class is packed with concepts and techniques for product and packaging design. Students will meet the following objectives: 

• Identify the key elements of a packaging composition including placement, product, and audience.
• Design a pizza box and carry-out bag in a single ink color.
• Identify the production, design, and budgetary differences between mass and prestige packaging designs.
• Create flat and 3D versions of a prestige carton, and present a sample counter animation.
• Develop an understanding of the ways in which marketing research, target audiences, and user profiles affect the packaging design process.
• Design and redesign a CD cover and disc according based on audience and project brief information.
• Develop an understanding of how playful packaging design is created through typography, balance, color, and other attributes.
• Design a playful packaging design for a toy carton.
• Understand and discuss how a product line is developed, updated, and expanded.
• Create two designs for a premium champagne carton working from a client brief.
• Develop an understanding of methods for presenting packaging designs to a client and launching a new design.
• Create a carton and bottle design for the launch of a new fragrance.

Class Instructor Bio:

Joss Parsey likes to describe herself as a graphics nomad. In the past two decades she has traveled through the diverse world of graphics working full-time and freelance for a varied crowd. The work has gone from designing fabrics for Liz Claiborne, logos for various institutions or for individuals, marketing pieces for photographers or corporations and posters for publishing houses. She worked in-house at Adobe Illustrator and was the graphic communication leader at Smart Design working on projects for Copco, Serengetti Sunglasses and Kepner Tregoe. She worked behind the scenes at the Art Institute in Chicago coordinating Design and Architecture programs and makes a point of never specializing within a media to be labeled a certain type of designer. Diversity and timeless solutions are keys to her approach.

LEFT: Image from Advanced Packaging Design. Course includes professional packaging design client engagements as case studies.