Yurko Gutsulyak , Olga Protasova – Sea Cruise & Melody

“Grona company started a snack cracker series creating two types of dough as a basis for different flavors. We were commissioned to create the global concept of these products to present them as final goods on the market. The target market is pretty wide as to age and territory – with Ukraine as a core, it stretches from East with Arab Emirates and China to West with Western European countries and the United States. The creative concept should be understandable to consumers with different backgrounds and respectful towards different cultures. These are affordable but quality mass market products.”

“The main design requirement was to create as many crackers figures as possible. For savory snacks sub-line we had to work only with outlines while for sweet snacks with shapes and prints. It was mandatory to show all crackers on the packaging as the next step of design process. Among all draft topics like “space discovery”, “forest walk”, “board games”, etc two priority ones were chosen. Both depict leisure and fun familiar basically to all people – “sea adventure” for salty flavors and “disco party” for sweet flavors. Final naming was created after cracker design was approved – Sea Cruise and Melody.”

“Our challenge was to make this project inspiring and somehow innovative despite commonplace brief: too wide target audience; requirements literally to depict all cracker figures on packaging; working for mass market segment. In order to balance all compromises, we decided to use handcrafted modeling clay sculptures combined with real crackers for illustrations. According to our research, this technique was not ever used in food packaging design before, so we are proud to be pioneers. At the very beginning, the client was confused that modeling clay would be mixed with food and it could cause negative reaction. However, the final result surprised the most conservative audience in a good way.

Sea Cruise

Sea Cruise is a low-fat and slightly salted cracker that at the moment includes three flavors: classic, onion and cheese. We recreated atmosphere of marine world in illustrations with accents on the floral elements to symbolize onion and on the evening sea to symbolize cheese.”

“Melody

Melody is a sweet light cracker with low sugar. Now there are two types in this sub-line: classic and with poppy seeds. While creating illustrations, we were inspired by colors and patterns of music culture from the 70s.”

“Behind The Scenes

The biggest part of design process was working with patterns. They had to be simple, diverse, not repetitive, kept in style, relevant to the topic and perfect background for the crackers. Within one illustration all patterns had to create complete solid image. When there was a mistake in proportions or colors, the whole composition was often redone. At the beginning, we aimed to get final illustration with one shoot but practically every illustration consists of at least three shoots: modeling clay, crackers and shadows. None of the sculptures survived and all modeling clay was reused for the new projects.”

“The whole project includes 54 patterns in total and around 100 patterns that were rejected. Here are the ones we managed to restore from our phones and cameras.”