Every project starts the same way. Before anyone opens a sketchbook, two of us spend two days in your world. Usually that is me and whoever will design the thing.
We go where the product is made and where it is sold. A workshop, a factory floor, a café counter at seven in the morning. We bring a notebook and a camera, and we mostly keep quiet.
The sign outside Toki's counter in Dubai. Our first morning on the project started behind it.
The note is the first thing we design. If a founder can't recognise their own business in it, we haven't listened yet.
Carlisle Stevens
Art Director
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Origin®
What we look for
We read everything you have printed so far. Old boxes, cup sleeves, the menu, the business cards, the sticker someone made at the copy shop. Each one records a decision somebody made without a guide.
At Toki we collected cups from the counter. Three suppliers had printed the logo, each in a different green. Nobody had chosen one. That finding set the first week of the project.
We watch hands. How people pick the product up, where they put it down, what they read first and what they never read. A label can be beautiful and still end up turned to the wall.
The note
At the end of the second day we write down what we heard. It runs to two or three pages. It says what the product is, who buys it, what it sits next to, and what the brand already does well.
You correct it. Founders usually fix two or three things, and those fixes are worth more than anything we found on our own. Then we draw.
Two days sounds like a lot on a two-week Sprint. It isn't. The drawing goes faster when we know what the pack has to survive.
