During my second year at university, I was handed a brief to create a luxury theatre pack that would be given to VIP guests on the opening night of a new Kabuki theatre production at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. The pack design would hold inside a book for the VIP guests that would acquaint them with the events of the night. The pack design had to communicate luxury, it would also have to be something that guests would want to keep around long after the event had passed.
Packaging
Illustration
3D Design
Illustration
3D Design
Initial idea generation for the package design.
It was important to communicate luxury in my packaging design so I chose to work with Hot foil because of its high finish and attractive shine. Ideally, the VIP guests would feel valued when they receive such a high-quality product.
Kabuki is the traditional Japanese theatre genre that originated in Kyoto during the Edo period. I wanted my packaging design to reflect both Japanese culture and Kabuki so I used patterns from traditional clothing as well as the expressions from actors' face paint.
Creating a unique experience for each guest was really important to me because I wanted the guests to feel special and to know that we had thought about them as an individual instead of as a group of customers. To do this VIP guests would receive a personality questionnaire upon purchase of a ticket, the answers would then be used to match their unique personalities to one of the three Kabuki archetypes. The results of the questionnaire would then be sent to the printers who would make the right number of each pack design and the guests would later receive the custom packs.
Inside the packs, guests receive a personalised hardcover book about Kabuki which also includes a 100+ page notebook for use as they see fit. I included the notebook so that the lifespan of the book was longer and to make the product more useful for guests.
Above to the right, you can see the inner box which houses the book. This box includes a short description of the character that matches the guest's personality which gives the guest a little context about the mask on the cover.
Storage for my theatre pack was another key concern for me, I wanted my product to fit on a bookshelf so that it could be on display constantly. When designing the packaging I created multiple physical scale models to test the size of a bookshelf.
These images are of my final rendered mockups included in my client pitch file. I created the 3D product models using google sketch up and then rendered them using Blender rendering engine Cycles.
The room Model and kitchen model were both created by another artist called Kless Gyzen and they can both be accessed at: https://www.cgtrader.com/klessgyzen
