I designed this Matcha tea packaging for Vireo that is a UK-based independent company selling their products on amazon.
I was asked to create a Japanese style packaging so I had a little look around on the site of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) where there are countless public domain images available to download. I browsed their Japanese section and found so many incredibly beautiful, vintage art works that I struggled to choose just one. After sending dozens of possible images to my client, we ended up with this one, featuring a cherry tree and moon.
The original image was a dark blue one with a white moon that I turned into this slightly different art work at the request of my client. Besides the colour adjustments, I also had to carry out slight modifications such as expanding the image on all sides, touch up some areas and create those stroke line effects for the moon.
After all that it was time to deal with the layout of the packaging which I always prefer to do with Illustrator. The program lets me set a bleeding that is important when it comes to designs for print and I can have all my elements as separate layers and still mess around with them at once.
I was really happy with the little silhouettes that bounded the off white area and made a clear separation between the vintage art work and the product label. My client asked me to use some vertical text too and some Japanese symbols and so I did: the black symbols stand for matcha tea and the red little stamp-like one means pure.
In addition to packaging design, I could also use my photo editing skills for this project. Dziugas sent me the previous product photos which I edited with Photoshop to look like these. The pouches used to be brown and had the old packaging designs on them, and the bowls didn’t even have any foam on them either. The hardest thing to edit though was the image with the dark background. It used to be a rectangular image which I had to augment to be wider. In order to do that I had to clone parts of the picture which was not easy because of the intricate details of the map but I think I did a good job with it because it doesn’t look too obviously repetitive.
art from scratch 