The body is usually used to carry label and text, but one exception is the Trevor. Sorbie Professional, see bottle I, which has the brand information labeled on top ...
PACKAGE SHAPE DESIGN PRINCIPLES TO SUPPORT BRAND IDENTITY Xiaojuan Chen, Alison McKay, Alan de Pennington, and Hau Hing Chau Design and Manufacture Research Group, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Abstract Brand identity has a profound relationship with packages. The geometric shape of a package is a key factor in the delivery of a product to consumers. It is a crucial task to preserve brand identity when shape changes, either to deliver similar stylistic designs, or to completely change the original one. This task requires not only a detailed analysis of designs of related packages, but also a deep understanding of their constructional principles. This paper presents recent research on the application of shape grammars in packaging design that addresses the above design issue. Shape grammars have been successfully applied in art and architecture. In these fields they have been used to capture design styles, and to generate existing and new designs in the same styles. Recently shape grammars have been introduced to product design, and have succeeded in supporting brand identity. This paper describes a case study that has been undertaken for personal care bottles to analyse their underlying design principles, and encode them into a parametric shape grammar. The rules of this grammar can be computed to derive designs covering products from different brands. Currently this general grammar is being established for a particular range of designs, to generate designs visually perceived to be related to one another and to fit the rules of a market segment.
Introduction A package can be a wrapping paper or a container that is used to protect the goods inside. Driven by highly competitive markets, its functions have been extended beyond this original intent. A package becomes a mark of difference and a symbol of recognition that delivers identities of a brand (Milton, 1991). It communicates with consumers messages of the product and provides a memorable image to add visual and emotional values. Coca-Cola has always understood the values of its curved shaped bottles, and promoted the distinguishing shape as an icon of the brand that can be recognised by people around the world (Beyer and McDermott, 2002). It is important that brand managers and designers consider how to design a package that can stand out from competitors and catch the consumer’s attention. When a company launches a new product that is related to a range of existing products, it is essential to keep a consistent product image to assure the continuity of brand value. The focuses of this research is to establish and test a method to support the design of distinctive packages with consistent brand identities. Consumers perceive a product and its brand mostly through their visual experience, and relate it to the product’s functions and value. Shape and colour are key elements
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of a package that contribute to the emotional experience. The emphasis of our research is the design of packaging geometric shape. This paper presents a recent research that applies a shape grammar approach for packaging designs. A case study has been undertaken for personal care bottles to explore general design principles, and represent them using a parametric shape grammar. Grammar generated designs cover package variants from different brands. Currently this general grammar is being established for a particular range of designs, to generate package shapes visually perceived to be related and to fit the rules of a market segment. This research has provided evidence that the shape grammar approach can contribute to package development and decision making processes in the following ways: -
It represents design concepts using shapes and rules rather than texts and labels, which reduces the chance of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. It generates design in a step by step way which helps designers explore design principles and the construction of design alternatives, so as to analyse designs of their own and those from competitors. It uses rules and computations that provide intuitive and explicit means to communicate design solutions between people from different departments, such as product designers, marketing people, and manufacturers. It helps brand owners and design houses to speed up the respond time in launching new products or changing the existing designs.
Background of shape grammars The shape grammar approach was first introduced by Stiny and Gips (1972) for stylistic study of paintings and sculptures. Gradually, it was widely adopted and applied in various visual design fields, such as architecture and product designs. A given shape grammar is a production system that generates a corpus of designs through a step by step process. A shape grammar comprises a range of shapes and rules. Rules are defined in form of two shapes connected by an arrow: AÆB An initial shape allows the beginning of a computation. A rule can be applied to a working shape C under the condition that a match can be found between shape A on the left-hand side of the rule and a subshape that is part of the shape C. Transformations t, such as rotation, mirror, and translation can be applied to shapes in order to find the match. The application of a rule takes place in two steps: erase the subshape that matches shape A that is on the left-hand side of the rule, and replace it by shape B that is on the right-side of the rule. This process can be presented in a mathematic form: C-t(A)+t(B) Design solutions are generated by a sequence of computations with rules. Figure 1 shows a two-rule shape grammar: rule 1 moves an arc to its left hand corner and rule 2 flips the arc. The cross indicates the orientation of a shape, which helps to locate shapes of a rule on the working shape C. Figure 2 is an initial shape that consists of a circle and two squares touching each other along their diagonal. The initial shape is the first working shape of every computation. Computations with the two rules can be carried out to derive a range of designs. Figure 3 illustrates two 2
computations and their generated designs. A computation can be terminated at any stage, either when a user is satisfied with the achieved design or when no more matches of shapes can be found to apply a rule.
rule 1 rule 2 Figure 1 Two rules
Figure 2 Initial shape
rule 1
rule 2
rule 2
Computation 1
rule 1
rule 1
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rule 2
Computation 2 Figure 3 Two computations The difference between the two final designs in Figure 3 is a result of applying rules to different subshapes of the working shape. In computations with rules, grammar users have the choices of which rule to apply, on which subshape of the working shape to apply the rule, and what transformation is used to apply the rule (Knight, 2003). The generated designs vary largely because of the decisions made throughout the computation process. There are supplementary features, such as labels and weights (Stiny, 1980), that can be added to shapes and serve particular purposes. Parametric shape grammars extend the basic shape grammars in a way that use a rule schema: g(A) Æ g(B) instead of the rule: AÆB g(A) and g(B) each consists of a range of shapes rather than a single shape. Variables are required to define shapes of a rule schema. Values need to be assigned to variables
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to determine a specific working shape. Parametric shape grammars provide a more general perspective on dealing with shapes than the basic one, and have been used in most design applications. The applications of shape grammars have their roots in arts and architecture. At an early stage, shape grammars were successfully used for describing design styles of artists and architects, including Chinese lattice (Stiny, 1977), Greek meanders (Knight, 1986), Palladio’s villas (Stiny and Mitchell, 1978), suburban Queen Anne houses (Flemming, 1987), and the windows of Frank Lloyd Wright (Rollo, 1995). Gradually, they were adopted in engineering domain, and applied for constructing functional components. Computer implementations usually come along side to assist the computation process. Some examples are the Lather grammar (Brown et al, 1994), the coffeemaker grammar (Agarwal and Cagan, 1998), and the MEMS grammar (Agarwal et al, 2000), to name but three. Recently, there is a growing interest in using shape grammars to support product exterior designs that retain a brand identity, such as Dove (Chau, 2002), Harley-Davidson (Pugliese and Cagan, 2002), and General Motor Buick (McCormack, Cagan and Vogel, 2004). This work aimed to illustrate the feasibility of applying shape grammars for the design of product packages, and explore key issues that may be involved in the application of the shape grammar approach. Personal care bottles were selected for a case study. A general shape grammar has been established to capture constructional principles of these bottle designs and encode them in shapes and rules. A case study of personal care bottles Personal care products are in a highly competitive market. For example, the on-line store, drugstore* offers 47 top brands in the personal care category, in addition to a large number of other brands. Searches for products result in 469 matches for shampoo, 406 matches for conditioner, and 208 matches for body wash. The overwhelming numbers of products and brands provide a wider range of options, but made a consumer’s purchasing decision more difficult. Psychology research has revealed that people are less likely to buy products if overloaded by too many choices, particularly when the differences between them are small (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000). This fact leads to a demand for non-functional features of a product to add values, such as aesthetics and brand. A brand relates consumers to a unique experience and feeling of a single product or a range of products, and the package of a product is the ultimate communicator that identifies a brand. Packages contribute to brand image. They communicate messages about quality, value and performance of a product and a brand. Shape and colour are two essential carriers of these messages. A study on personal care packages revealed companies’ branding strategies of using shapes and colours. Shape can be a dominating feature for brand identity when colours are used to differentiate products, and when a similar colour scheme has been adopted by several brands. For examples, Clairol Herbal Essences provides a range of shampoos and conditioners for various hair care needs. Coloured bottles are used to distinguish their contents, and a unique shaped bottle is used for brand recognition; blue-white is used by Dove, Nivea and Head & Shoulders, so their bottle shapes need to be distinctive enough to set them apart. * http:// www.drugstore.com
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In this case study, eighteen bottles were selected from various brands, and examined with an emphasis on exploring constructional principles of their geometric shapes. The selection of objects was as diverse as possible to cover a wide range of design variants on the market. Some of them were selected from the same brand to illustrate that they are distinctive from each other over brands and similar within their own brands. For example, two Elvive bottles are soft tapered oval shapes, the Gliss Kur bottles both comprise sharp edge contour, and the L’Oreal Kits bottles are asymmetric. Figure 4 shows the eighteen bottles labelled with letters.
A
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Figure 4 The eighteen selected bottles
CAP
WAIST
BODY
SHOULDER
HEEL BASE
Figure 5 A generic bottle description
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(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 6 Three cross section relations In order to examine the structure of the bottles, a generic description was defined, as shown in Figure 5. A bottle is a closed container that consists of two parts: cap and body. The body is usually used to carry label and text, but one exception is the Trevor Sorbie Professional, see bottle I, which has the brand information labeled on top of the cap. A body can be divided into four subparts: shoulder, waist, heel, and base. Subparts are not compulsory elements. They may appear in a bottle individually or in combination, for example, bottles B and G have shoulders, N and P have waists, and H has both subparts. A study of the bottle structures revealed that the shape of a bottle is constructed by cross-sections and their spatial relations. The shapes of the cross sections were found to be oval, circle, triangle, oblong, or polygon. The orientations and relative angles of cross sections determine a bottle’s front and side views. Figure 6 shows three relations of cross sections: (a) a symmetric teardrop shape with the centres of the cross sections along a common line; (b) centers are not along a straight line; (c) top surface has an angle to the lower one. Cross sections can be connected using linear or curvilinear surfaces that create sharp or smooth edges, see Figure 7.
Figure 7 Sharp and smooth edged shapes Most of bottle examples are symmetrical from all three views: front, top, and side views. Asymmetric design is a strategy to distinguish a package from others. Asymmetry cross sections and spatial relations (b) and (c) in Figure 6 can be used for an asymmetric designs, such as bottles I, Q, O and P.
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The analysis work has extracted design principles of bottle shapes, which can be used to instruct other designs. A parametric shape grammar has been created that encodes these design principles into a set of shapes and rules. A parametric shape grammar for bottle designs A parametric shape grammar based on the study of eighteen bottle designs has been established. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes and rules were defined to capture design principles. Parametric representation allows the parameters of a shape to vary, which extends the number of applicable shapes using a single rule. Rules of the grammar fall into two categories: transformation rules of cross sections and construction rules, shown as Figure 8a and 8b. The transformation rules, A1 to A6, consist of cross section shapes that are involved in the eighteen designs, and allow the shapes to be changed according to designers’ preference. The oval shape is used in most of the rules because it is a common shape that is used for bottle designs. Construction rules, B1 to B8, consist of three-dimensional shapes that represent the constructional principles of the designs. Rule B1 extrudes an ellipse into a column which is used to create a 3D container from a 2D cross section. Rules B4 to B7 provide means to manipulate the original 3D container and generate various forms. When there are more than three cross sections, rule B8 can be applied to replace linear surfaces with a curvilinear surface to smooth along cross sections. Each computation begins with the initial shape, an ellipse, as shown in Figure 9.
Æ
Rule A1
Æ
Rule A2 Æ
Rule A3 Æ
Rule A4 Æ
Rule A5 Æ
Rule A6 Figure 8a Cross section transformation rules
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Æ
Rule B1
Æ
Rule B2
Æ
Rule B3
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Rule B4
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Rule B6
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Rule B8 Figure 8b Construction rules
Figure 9 Initial shape Computations and grammar generated designs In this case study, the parametric shape grammar created for the selected designs has captured their constructional principles and is able to regenerate the existing designs and generate new designs. To justify this claim, computations with rules have been carried out. Figures 10a to 10g illustrate seven computations that derive designs given in Figure 4. It should be noted that the grammar generated designs represent main structure of the bottles. Decorative curves and radius are not included.
D
D
D
D
Ø
Figure 10a Derivation of Dove body wash
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D
D
D
D
Ø
C
C
C
Figure 10b Derivation of ELVIVE Shampoo and conditioner 2 in 1
D
D
D
D
Figure 10c Derivation of Head & shoulder shampoo & conditioner 2 in 1
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D
D
Figure 10d Derivation of SASSON shampoo
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D
D
D
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Figure 10e Derivation of Trevor Sorbie Professional shampoo
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D
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Figure 10f Derivation of GLISS KUR conditioner
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D
D
D
D
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C
C
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Figure 10g Derivation of GLISS KUR shampoo
Figure 11 Grammar generated new designs Comparing the seven computations, it is easy to describe the similarities and difference between the designs through their derivation processes. The cross sections of Dove and Elvive are both oval shapes connected by a curved surface, but Dove needed four cross sections rather than three to achieve its teardrop shape. The construction of the Elvive cap took an extreme condition where the top cross section is a point. The Head & Shoulders and the Sasson bottles used the same construction
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rules, but their cross section shapes are different. The Trevor Sorbie is perceived as being unique for two reasons: its bottom cross section is a triangle, and its top cross section has an angle to the next one. Two Gliss Kur bottles looks similar because rectangles and octagons are repeatedly used for their cross sections. Using the same set of rules, other bottle designs were generated, and their unique features were explored. Figure 11 shows four new designs that were generated using the grammar. Conclusions Packages contribute to brand image and recognition. In a market where hundreds of products are competing with each other, design for a unique brand identity is a crucial task for brand managers and product designers, and brings a new challenge for traditional design methods. The shape grammar approach is a production system that supports analysis and representing designs. It enhances the understanding and communication of packaging designs and supports the design and decision making processes. This paper presented a parametric shape grammar to capture the constructional design principles of eighteen personal care bottles. 2D and 3D shapes and rules are descriptions of the extracted principles. Computations with the rules have been used to generate the selected bottle designs and four new designs. The next phase of this research will base on the general shape grammar and will focus on a range of products with consistent identities. Parameter constraints are being applied and rules are being defined to specify particular identities. Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank Faraday Packaging Partnership and School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds for their financial support to present this paper.
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