Packaging Styles
Lumi, 2019From 2018-2021, I worked on the content team as the web and visual designer at Lumi, focusing on the logged-out experience of the site. Lumi is a software that connects brands looking for packaging to packaging suppliers and experts all over the world.
My work at Lumi covered a lot of ground — our team was small (but mighty!) so I wore a lot of hats. My role was to make niche industry information more available and digestible, while staying true to the design guidelines we had developed over the years. This involved a range of skills, including research, information architecture, experience design, hiring and managing contractors, art direction, and web development, to name a few.
The goal
To help customers find packaging styles that would match their needs, and understand what’s possible. To create a shared language between Experts, customers, and manufacturers. To increase discoverability, improve SEO.
The project
I researched existing libraries of box styles, both corrugated and folding carton designs. There are a few industry standard style libraries that I gathered and organized. From my research, I organized the styles into Styles, Standards, and Details.
I managed a small team for this project — I worked with Ryan Baysa, the packaging engineer at Lumi, to design and cut out samples of each Style. From there, I photographed each sample and worked with a graphic designer to create wireframes of each Style, which are used as the thumbnail images and annotated on the individual pages. I worked with a freelance packaging designer to export thumbnails for every Standard and Detail.
We exported all of the wireframe and dieline assets as SVGs so our team can adjust the styling in CSS, ensuring a standardized line weight and color (i.e. changing color for dark mode).
I used wireframes to show the styles because I wanted to narrow in on the fact that all styles could be cut from a range of materials, and I didn’t want any material or print to distract the user from the structure.
Details are individual features of each packaging Style, which can be optional or have various configurations.
Standards are preset templates for each Style with the Details already configured. Standards only require a choice of dimensions and material type to be turned into a dieline. Packaging engineering software such as ArtiosCAD and Arden Impact are already loaded with these Standards as a starting point to create dielines.
All assets are exported as SVGs so we could style them for different uses, including dark mode.
I tagged our library of images with product info — product, materials, print processes, styles, and details — so this section would autofill with the most recent photos of the style.