Visually, the reds and gold are the main through-line of the season, every design needs to be in these colours and this is the only season that doesn’t need to have Purdys Purple in it beyond logos (which can be in gold if it suits the design better). Another common element in these design is circles: the ripples created by the fish and the background elements filled in with geometric patterns. The vector brush strokes create the closest approximation to brush painting in an infinitely scalable format which makes it much easier to reuse and rescale the illustrations vs raster.
The Zodiac animals are presented in 2 different ways, one per year by itself as the animal of that year; and the coin tin and box sleeve that feature all of the animals. On the coin tin, the animals are all roughly in the order of the race from the folktale, complete with the Rat jumping off of the Ox’s head. The hero animals are highlighted through a cutout and wrapped around the sleeve, the extra gold added some elegance and broke up the patterned background as well as showed off the coat of arms emblem on the box itself. By wrapping the animal, it allowed it to be on a larger scale, wrapping off ears and tail respectively.
Photography of items from 2022 and earlier is by Purdys photographers.
For more specifics on print production for packaging design, I’ve written a blog post detailing my process.
2021 and 2022 Designs with Digital Banner
Art Direction of 2022 Designs
