What’s the deal with Ducalm?
To me Ducalm is a brand that to has excellent formulations, but the packaging does not spark joy, at least not to me. I especially love their two cleansers, everything about the formulations are great, the texture, colour, scent... love it! Since I think the formulations are bomb, I wanted to put together my idea of a reimagined Ducalm and take you through my though process. This might not be the best direction for the brand to take, but it’s my take on what the brand could be.
Coco Milky and Jelly Rose Facial Cleansers
Here are the two products I will be creating a new design for. Let’s take a look at what were working with. My first impression is that the design feels crowded, there’s a lot going on. A lot of different font styles and sizes and the visual hierarchy feels unbalanced. The size of the text that says “Facial Cleanser” feels way too big. The logo take up almost a third of the front of the bottle, with both an icon and subline. There’s a colour dip for the background, a wonky pattern on the sides, a scribbled little illustrated icon and a coloured box behind the text Hydrating/Balancing. It’s just a lot honestly.
When redesigning something like this I like to recreate something similar to what the current design looks like, though no use putting too much time into recreating elements I don’t intend on keeping, thus no illustrated icon and no wonky pattern.
Keep it Simple
For my first pass on this I just wanted make things simpler. Modern cosmetics packaging in general is quite minimalist. Other than removing the illustrated icon and wonky pattern I also wanted to simplify the logo. I choose a similar but not the same font and decided to just have the text. I then wanted to address the visual hierarchy. Instead of putting such a heavy emphasis on FACIAL CLEANSER, I instead wanted to put the name of the specific product in centre. Coco Milky and Jelly Rose are great product names that are also very descriptive of the type of cleanser each of them are. I moved the rest of the text to be together at the bottom.
Minimalist
I further reduce the design to it’s most minimal base essentials. I decided to make the bottom text the same style and made it lower case to create contrast from the middle text. This could be on still the white base, but I was thinking since the juice inside the bottle has such pretty colours it would make sense to make the bottles clear instead.
Bringing it Back in
Now that we have simplified as much as possible, it feels a bit like something is missing. So, let’s bring back at least one element. I do like having different colours for the products, so we can bring back the blue and pink. We could make the while packaging monochrome with white text, but it doesn’t feel like it’s a good fit for the brand. Rather than having a colour dip like before, I think having a colour square that further highlights the name of the product would be more suitable.
The Final Design
The final design I like the most is using the colour square on clear packaging. I think this design feels a lot more modern and it highlights the appeal of the product. These cleansers are quite affordable at only $15 each, with this design and the same formulation that would feel like a steal. I think it would still feel like a good deal even at a higher price point.
Let’s Make Look Real
My flat illustrations don’t quite communicate what the final product would look like as well as I would like, especially for a packaging that is transparent. So decided to make some 3D renderings. I think it looks even better seeing it this way! The blue looks perfect against the milky white and the pink label stands out more than it did on the illustration.
Creating a Scene
Honestly a big reason why I decided to create this kind of scene was so I would have a good image to use for the thumbnail. But also, because this is often the fun part. I liked this scene that I created, but I think the setting suited the Coco Milky Cleanser a lot better than the Jelly Rose. So, I decided to make separate scenes for them.
Coco Milky Dreamscape
I love how the marble, soft clouds and blue sky looks together with the milky white cleanser with it’s blue square. I like adding the clear glass orbs because their reflections of the scene make things feel more dynamic and real.
Jelly Rose Sunset
To create a scene that worked better for Jelly Rose I wanted to use a pink cloudy sky and added pink curtains to the scene for some more warmth. I think the results turned out quite dreamy and feels like a good match for the Jelly Rose Cleanser.
Final Thoughts
I’m pretty happy with how the design turned out. What do you think? Do you like the old design more? Or did you like any of the iterations better than the final one? What products should I redesign next?
