Saltmarsh packaging

A range that had not been designed as a range

Saltmarsh had four products, designed one at a time by whoever was available. On a shelf they looked like four companies. The brief was to make the fifth launch look like it belonged — and to make the sixth and seventh possible without me.

A grid, not a layout

The thing handed over was not artwork. It was a grid and a set of rules about where things may sit within it.

• A fixed masthead zone. Same height, same position, every pack, every size.
• A flexible middle. Product name, variant and volume, with defined minimum and maximum sizes rather than fixed ones.
• A locked foot. Ingredients, barcode and legal text in a band nobody may redesign.

Making it cheap to print

One spot colour across the range, chosen because it held up on both the coated and uncoated stock the supplier had available. Everything else is achieved with the substrate and the ink already on the press.

Handover

Print-ready templates for each pack size, a one-page specification for the supplier, and a short note on what to do when a product does not fit the grid — which is to change the product name, not the grid.