Product Label Design Ideas & Guide to Effective Design
Table of Contents
A product label design isn’t one to joke around with if you really want to make sales. It’s important to your product’s success. It’s one of those important things that fascinate your customers, arouse their curiosity, and pulls them in to buy your product.
Picture your potential customer walking into a store or searching a website looking for a product within your niche. In a world of many, you have less than 5 seconds to convince a customer you matter and that they should choose you. How do you do so without being there in person to call their attention?
Your product label design would do the job. A lot of people make an impression about a product through its label design. Yet, 85% of products fail to capitalize on this and fail to pitch in the market. Most businesses design whacky, forgettable label designs that make their products end at the back of the shelf gathering dust.
This doesn’t have to happen to your product. It’s important you approach your product labels with creativity and strategy.
Whether you’re a small business or big company; or your product is packaged in a bottle, can, plastic, or box, we’ll show you how to create enchanting product label designs as well as remarkable product label design ideas for inspiration to create yours. Check out some eco-friendly packaging design ideas.
What is product label design?
A label design is a tool of attraction. It is a crucial part of product packaging. It is that printed material on your packaging design that creates awareness for your product aside from other marketing means.
Just like your logo design helps people to recognize your business, your product label makes your product more recognizable and makes your product packaging more attractive.
What Makes A Good Label Design?
A good label design communicates what you stand for, tells your product story, makes you memorable, and helps potential customers understand the importance of your product to them. Your product label will communicate this using color, shapes, typography, and other design elements.
An effective design increases your chance of grabbing your prospective customer’s attention with the first impression. It is the first thing your prospective buyer sees when they decide to purchase your product in a store or online.
Product labels are what make you easily recognized. Therefore, your product label design must be excellent, aesthetically pleasing, attention-grabbing, accurate, and purposeful.
Product label provides product information and also communicated brand identity. It carries elements that distinguish your business from others within your industry but also tells your customer why they should buy your product.
It can be neck-breaking to design a good product label that is evocative and has all the design fitting for your product. Approaching professional designers or contacting a graphic design agency can help you ease the process.
Before you embark on the process of designing your product label, let’s talk about what to do before you start the design process, best practices for product labels, and trends you might want to consider.
Label Design Best Practice
The following are elements and practices you want to focus on to get the best out of your label design.
Know Your Product
This should be a pretty obvious thing to do. What are the ingredients of your product? What’s your history? What’s the packaging like? What material is it made of? How does your product get to the market?
The answers to these questions would not only help you decide the essential element to put on your label- what information to put on your label design but also help you decide on what type of design and design material to use. Would the design look great on vellum non-gloss paper? Or better on gloss or vinyl? You have to create a design that fits on multiple labels.
Also, knowing what information you need to put on the design – barcode, association design, ad copy, batch number, etc… helps you plan your design effectively. It helps you put the label size in mind. This also helps you avoid unnecessarily stuffing your product design with irrelevant info.
Know Your Customers
Who are the buyers? Children or adults? Men or Women? Where and how are they buying your product? Are your products going to a supermarket? Exclusively online? Or both?
It’s important to appeal to your target audience when designing your product label. For example, if you’re selling to children, you may include emoticons or playful symbols that appeal to children. If you’re selling to environmentally conscious people, you might want to use eco-friendly elements in your design. Or evoke luxury if you’re specifically targeting affluent customers. Check out some packaging design inspiration.
Also, where your product is sold is important because it helps you gauge competition and chances of getting noticed. Products are fighting to get noticed on supermarket shelves. Why should yours win? Your label design can be the deciding factor.
Research Your Competitors
The most important function of your label design is to help you stand out in a sea of other products. So, going blindly into the label design process without knowing what your competitors are already doing is a bad move.
There are design elements that are popular within industries, so you don’t want to get into the pitfall of looking exactly like your competitors’.
The key to creating a unique design is to avoid generic product label templates. While you may draw inspiration from your competitors’ product label design, it is important to avoid plagiarizing. Plagiarism may lead to legal situations and may mislead your new customers. Download some free banner templates.
Use Graphic Elements Sparingly
Once you have all the information you want to include in your product label, it’s tempting to want to keep the design busy. Don’t. Your label will lose impact if it’s saturated with different clashing elements.
Moreover, a busy design isn’t advisable from such a small printed material as a label. That’s why you have to aim for simple and flexible designs that fit different label sizes.
To achieve simplicity, consider using white space in your design. White space so not have to be white. It’s any background color in your label design. It helps you separate information so it can be easily read by customers. It also creates a distinction between visual elements and connotes user-friendliness.
Use Enhanced Readability
Regardless of how good your product and design are, it is important that the consumer easily receive the correct message you are trying to pass. Your product details, instructions, and company information need to be aligned accurately without confusing the customer.
You want to keep the texts in your label design legible so that people can read them from a good distance.
To enhance readability, consider using contrasting yet complementary colors for the background and the text. Also, use a larger font size for the product names and other relevant information.
For a round label design, you can also consider placing the product benefits on one side (the front side) to attract the audience and other information such as ingredient composition on the flip side.
Choose the Right Typographic Pairing
Typography is an art that requires intentionality. So many brands fail to rank in the market because of whacky typography.
Picking the right typographic pairing in your product label design elevates the quality of your design. It will also help potential customers to easily identify your product and its features from a good distance.
So, while deciding on the typography, use typographic pairing to show visual distinction and the relationship between the information on your label design. However, if there’s a continuity in information, use the same typeface to avoid confusion.
Overall, ensure that the typeface is consistent with your brand. It has to reflect the same style already used in your logo design and other graphic designs. Also, make sure it reflects the nature of the product. Check out some unique packaging design ideas.
Keep it Purposeful and Informative
Good product labels give a glimpse of what the product is about. They drive brand awareness. Although you might try to be playful with your label design, you still have to make sure your brand identity is communicated within the label. You can achieve this by putting your business logo above other visual elements.
Be Wary of Trends
Sometimes you may want to include trending elements in your product label design. However, you want to make sure your product label isn’t changing every now and then to help you remain recognizable. Remain timeless and stay adaptable to trends rather than affected by them.
Be Creative with Illustration
Consider how you can make your label more compelling without stuffing your design with too many elements. Using illustration and other graphic designs might be helpful.
Illustrations can tell the nature of the product inside packaging more effectively than words. For example, this peach drink uses the font, color, and background to illustrate the nature of the product.
Research Into Label Printers
Once you complete the design, the rest of your design process (and in fact a major part) lies on having a good print of the label.
Regardless of the time and effort you’ve put into the design, the print quality plays a major part in how effective the product label is. If you work with a label printer that uses subpar products, you’ll end up having a whack label that fails to leave the right impression on your prospective customers.
So, you have to research deeply into the labels you’re choosing – read reviews online about the technologies they are using, check out samples, inquire what their process looks like, what raw material they use, delivery timelines, quotes, etc. You have to get the right printer for this sensitive project.
That said, while you might be able to find some product label design resources to help you with your design process, the best chance at getting an enchanting product label is to consult a professional design agency to help you execute your label design project.
Before you go, let’s look at some label design trends to get you inspired on what to ask your designer.
Product Label Design Inspiration
’60s Psychedelia Reborn
The 1960s psychedelia never fails to stay in trend. It gives a feeling of freedom and happiness and appeals to a wide audience. The psychedelic designs are beautiful on any type of brand.
Faux 3D
Faux 3D is an innovative graphic design that gives a sophisticated and contemporary look to product labels. Its illusionary look makes the customers pause to take a look. However, the design often requires technical expertise to execute.
Die cut
Die-cut is what you’ll call every label design. However, some brands use custom die. If you run a food brand, shelf appearance and endurance are paramount to your product. As such, your label design should carry elements that reflect these.
Printing techniques for die-cut labels vary, but they are used for almost any product or for purpose.
Local artwork
Another style you can adopt for your label design is local or cultural artwork designs. Traditional designs tell deep, unique stories in a way that captivates the mind of consumers in a memorable way.
Implementing traditional artwork makes your design memorable and helps it stand out amidst other products. But to create unique artwork, you need to deploy the services of a professional label design agency that knows what they’re doing.
Personalization label
Personalized labels help to convey a unique identity for your brand. They help consumers to easily identify your product on shelves even when they are placed side-by-side with other competitors’ brands.
Moreover, sometimes, especially when you’re new customers don’t recall your brand’s name, they can differentiate products based on their packaging and labels.
Coating
Different types of coatings are used in label designs, which help to create the label’s final outlook and feel.
spot coatings
Spot coatings are typically used to embolden a specific attribute, area, or element of a label. Spot coating creates a surface and optical contrast that generates a pattern. Generally, these can be gloss or matt. They make an efficient textured, 3D look when used in opposite combinations.
textured coatings
Textured coatings have a distinctive visual and tactile quality that gives a rough feel, and an abrasive and textured finish. They also provide a hardy raised sight with a matt appearance. However, they are more efficient when used in contrast with spot coatings to focus on particular label elements.
Text-Centric & Bold Color Design
Fonts and colors might just be what your label needs to be attractive. When done efficiently, your label can be arresting.
To get it right, you have to choose a typeface and color that fits your brand and product. You can also be creative with how you place the fonts- they could be eccentric, playful, bold, or solid.
By executing this kind of label, priority is given to all necessary information to help consumers easily recall it.
Shades & Gradient
The shades and gradient are a moderate blending from one color to another color where there are no restrictions between these two shades. The Y2k aesthetic design is a great example of this.
The gradient trend is substantially adaptable and powerful with the design. Moreover, the mix of shades can generate a new creative color combination that gives a trendy feel and attachment to label design.
Sustainable materials
In the current reality, consumers are much more conscious and concerned about the eco-friendly ethos of brands. They are attracted to brands that remind consumers about sustainability.
Therefore, it is high time you thought about environmentally friendly and renewable materials in creating your label designs.
Sustainable designs also create a healthy atmosphere and comfort of building performance.
More Product label design ideas
Conclusion
With all the elements mentioned above, you too can create show-stopping product labels to enhance your brand identity. We’ve also shown you design trends that can inspire your own idea.
As long as you employ the services of a professional designer for your product label, you can persuade your customers to choose you above every other brand that provides your type of product.
