All Design is Packaging Design

« Mina Perhonen| Tea Blogs I Love »

I used to think of boxes as bread used to carry some interesting spread to your mouth. I didn’t have any packaging in my industrial design portfolio because I lumped packaging with other “support” items, like a domain name and clever business cards, that make a product possible, but aren’t “purely” the fruit of design.

Last night I worked on the packaging design for Sorapot. Designing the box forced me to think more about the teapot’s shape than I had when I imagined it unpacked, sitting confidently on someone’s table, ready to make tea. Michael Beiruit describes the processes of speechwriting and graphic design as taking a “complicated bunch of ideas and reduc[ing] them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence.” Beiruit could easily be talking about any creative process here, but his quote captures packaging design so well. A good box summarizes a product’s most conspicuous features through a very limited vernacular: a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard.

Sorapot itself is a package though; literally a holder for tea, but also a package for the tea ritual’s network of meanings. I designed it to emphasize green tea’s stand-out features, like unfurling leaves and bitterness that comes from boiling water. Sorapot’s designed around the shape of the tea ritual, just as its box is designed to hold and support its shape.

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