Package Design
Over the years, I’ve had a number of occasions to design various packaging for toys and promotional merchandise. I’ve also done some personal projects that involved either re-creating vintage packaging and card backs, reimagining them, or just doing something new altogether in that space.
Promotional Merchandise
Having worked for many QSRs, I’ve designed my share of fast food toys. Many times, those will be packaged on a card or in a custom box. I’m happy to say that two of my packages are in the National Video Game Museum!
Longbox Heroes
For the toy line that I developed with Fresh Monkey Fiction, I designed all the print materials, from the front and back of the wave one cards, to a refreshed design for wave two, and many, many alternate character choices, along with an alternate design for our black-and-white newsreel five pack.
Cereal boxes
It doesn’t come up often, but a few times I’ve designed a cereal box and developed the content for every panel. Below are a commission project I did for a cereal based on the classic Clash of the Titans movie (1980), and another one for General Mills based on the fake property that they use to develop pitches for potential new partners.
Action Figure Cards
The prime area of toy packaging design for me these days is the action figure card. This is a collection of cards for pitches and fan-made custom lines, along with potential design refreshes of perennial licensed IP such as Star Trek, along with a design exploratory that I did for Bif Bang Pow’s Flash Gordon line.
Batman Project
Here is the packaging for my mega project, where I created dozens of 1:12 scale figures based on the first two Tim Burton Batman movies, and then continuing through four more films that imagined where he might go, had he continued on. The first three sets of packages take their cues from the classic 1990s Kenner Batman toy lines, translated to a modern 6-inch action figure box, with the remainder staying true to the set design language.
Indiana Jones
Much like the Batman Project, on a much smaller scale, I envisioned where Kenner might have taken Indiana Jones had they launched a new comprehensive line in 1989 to tie in with “Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade”. I wanted to make sure that I would follow the design language that Kenner used across all of its lines at the time, and would not look out of place next to any of them on store shelves.
Retro Recreations
I’ve also re-created and updated many existing package designs from the 1980s, building vector versions from the ground up of all logos and design elements present on the classic packaging, but tweaking it just enough to look like a consistent design evolution past where the actual lines ended.
