Robert Bergman

Founder, creative director

Mpakt, New York City

http://m-pakt.com

Technology is speeding ahead, consumers are racing to keep up, and the market is tagging-along as best it can. What’s ‘new’ is ‘old’ quicker than ever and factoring-in the amped-up competition makes survival of the fittest-product ever more challenging.

We have but a split-second to grab a customer’s attention or they’re on to something newer. To be successful, a product must make a consumer stop and look—approach, read and buy. It must speak with a powerful, clear and attractive voice. So how does a product find success in this brave new world? The answer is — design that speaks to our times.

What makes or breaks product success today are aesthetics and communication —the design of  “the package.”  Dieter Rams, the design genius behind Braun’s revolutionary products, said, “good design helps a product to be understood,” but in this millennium the rules have change. All bets are off. In this new century, to be simply understood isn’t nearly enough. What doesn’t speak up and stand out will be left behind. The language a product speaks must be crystal clear, and have a finely tuned, beautiful voice — it has to speak with a new visual vocabulary.

This new vocabulary uses typography, imagery, color and form to communicate in groundbreaking ways: focusing, exciting, and innovating the message. It steers clear of anything extra, dated, busy or confusing. The look is always strong, powerful, sophisticated and bold —power-modernism.  Power-modernism balances bold, strong modern typography with a sensitivity for design: aesthetics, balance, harmony and open-space, combining powerful imagery that is never cluttered or too busy to understand immediately.

The beauty industry is a never-ending cycle of product launches and promotions where success or failure are clocked by the hour. I meet daily with marketing teams in the world’s biggest beauty companies to get briefed on new packaging projects or to modernize aging ones. It’s becoming common to be briefed on packaging a new product and then watch competitive changes alter the brief constantly during the design process. It forces you to react quickly as the future is now. One week a product has to be a certain color or have a certain product benefit, the next week it is wrong. This creates an exciting environment to perfect the ‘recipe’ of power-modernism in a microclimate ripe with potential wisdom to apply to all markets.

All you have to do is a little surfing online to see the incredible increase in velocity of  the evolution in the global market—and to be successful, packaging design must evolve at that same speed. Simply put, products need to cut through the clutter like never before. The need for power-modernist packaging that makes a consumer stop and take notice has never been greater.