Designing a pack with a photograph on it

A photograph on a pack has to survive being printed, folded, stacked and looked at from two metres away in bad light. Most of what makes it work has nothing to do with whether it is a good photograph.

Legibility comes first

The busiest, most detailed part of a nature frame is very often exactly where the logo wants to sit.

There are two honest solutions. Choose a frame with a genuinely quiet area - sky, water, mist, out-of-focus foreground - and put the type there. Or commit to a scrim: a solid panel, a strong controlled gradient, a real darkening of a region.

A slight blur behind text is the solution everyone reaches for and it does not work. It produces a slightly blurred busy area behind text, which reads as indecision.

Test at shelf distance, early. A layout that reads on a monitor at 200 per cent frequently fails at two metres.

The flat plan eats resolution

Pack artwork is laid out flat and folded afterwards, so an image wrapping a front and a side has to cover considerably more area than the front panel suggests.

Do the pixel arithmetic against the flat dimensions plus bleed. Three millimetres of bleed on every side is standard, and anything you care about has to sit inside the safe margin.

Nature compositions built to the frame edge are exactly the ones that lose a horizon to the trim.

Colour moves on stock

Packaging is CMYK on a substrate that shifts everything again. Saturated colour pulls back. Deep shadow blocks up more than it does on a backlit screen. An uncoated board will take the warmth out of everything.

Convert once, at the end, with the printer's profile, then get a contract proof on the actual stock. If the photograph is carrying the shelf appeal, the proof is not optional and it is trivially cheap against a print run.

What the picture implies

The problem that generates the most correspondence after printing.

A photograph of a hillside does not certify that your ingredient came from a hillside, that it is wild, local, organic or sustainable. Regulators in several markets assess the overall impression a pack creates, imagery included, so a picture implying a claim your copy cannot support is a genuine exposure rather than a theoretical one.

The photograph is illustration. The claim is yours to substantiate.

And your competitor can buy it too

On packaging, where the image does the most identity work of any use, non-exclusivity matters most. Crop hard, grade to your palette, and choose the frame that was not on the first page of results.