I remember the first time I saw one of my designs printed. It was a dubious looking London club flyer for legendary nightclub Heaven. It featured an alien scanned from some horror novel (and it did not look as awesome as it may sound). My first ‘big’ design was a Heineken pack for the European market. I was, of course, very proud (and so was mom). It was quite something to see my work plastered on billboards and on the shelf in the local store. As all designers know, it is a great feeling to see something you have worked on launched for all to see and admire. You get praise from (yes, mom) your friends, peers and of course the client (and if you are lucky, consumers). Once your pack design is out however, the rush quickly fades away, and then it’s on to the next design project. After years of experiencing the ebb of that initial excitement, I’ll share my hypothesized explanation.

Remembering the static designs from my early days, I felt pack design was just that, ‘a pack’, nothing more nothing less. Placed as a passive element in advertising communication, it was not ‘doing’ anything. This made me feel as if the role of packaging was massively undervalued. Countless times, myself and those around me wondered how we could evolve packaging to something that was not static, and active and alive. It made no sense for the point of contact with the consumer, to be one-dimensional and boring. Then, our world began to change…