designwhat's up?

work in progress

Today’s picture going with this post shows you a work in progress. A banana peel illustration that waits to get finished, while the real banana peel has turned from yellow to all brown. I wanted to get it all done on Saturday, but it took too much time. It is a rather large format digital painting, emulating acryl. I did a first pencil emulated sketch that I try to fill with color and life.

I picked this illustration to go with today’s post as we have a lot of ongoing stuff here at tauerville, with a lot of things being work  in progress. And some of the work in progress hasn’t really gone off the sketching board, too. Not materialized, yet in a sense. And some  of the work in progress comes with questions that I need to answer and depending on the answer the consequences are different. I guess I will talk in the coming day(s) and weeks(s) quite a bit about work in progress.

Right now, the biggest chunk of work in progress is the new box for my Tauer products. The regular readers of this blog know that I love the pentagonal box. But it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations. It is too voluminous, it is too easily dented (by pressure from outside and by the flacon inside), and it is difficult to pack and store. And for clients with small hands it is difficult to open. Thus, I decided to get a new packaging done. Goal: Get it ready and start shipping products in the new packaging by 2013, early 2013.

But I want to stay in the same materiality and in a sense, I want to keep a few lines that refer to the “old design”, like the logo, the pentagon somewhere. Thus, it will be a metal box,but a square one. And, as you know me, it will be a metal box with a twist: It will come with a sliding mechanism to open, like you find it in the discovery set. The metal box will feature my logo and it will hold the flacon snugly and tightly in place, thus eliminating the need to actually create an inlay. We got a first model, made from plastic and I love it.  It feels good because it is smaller and nevertheless, it looks actually equally luxurious. I will meet with my designer this week and we will work on minor changes of the patterns and shapes and will then soon start production.

Once the box is defined and its design frozen: I will start working on the cardboard that goes around it. Yes, a cardboard sleeve or box will protect the tin box, and will help to easy label things and ship the products. And I think it will underline that every tauer flacon is a precious, luxurious, yet affordable object.

I had furthermore the idea of introducing some pictures, graphical elements for each scent, going with the packaged flacon, maybe printed outside, or printed on a card. A sketch, an idea, a simple drawing. And on the other hand I want to get rid of the notes on the packaging, and rather put this information inside or somewhere else, like in a booklet.

I feel that my flacons need a little bit of an emotional, visual element. Just a hint. A line. Or two. It must not even be a colored sketch. A few pencil emulated lines might work as well.