Principles of Beauty Design #1: Layout
- Jennifer Carlsson
- May 28
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Learning to See Through Layout
We’re going to start this series by looking at the typical layout of the front of beauty products. A great way to learn how to see and understand layout is to recreate existing designs. This hands-on approach helps train your eye to notice spacing, hierarchy, and structure in a deeper way.
Since this is the first post in the series, we’re starting with simple, minimalist examples—specifically perfume bottles, where layout is stripped down to its essentials. These examples are perfect for building a strong foundation.
Why Look at Multiple Examples?
Never look at just one example. To really get the most out of this exercise, you need to look at several similar designs side by side. That’s how you’ll start to see the patterns—not just what makes them similar, but also where and how they differ. Design is often about subtle decisions, and comparison is key to understanding them.
How to Recreate Beauty Packaging Layouts
Start Simple and Don’t Stress the Fonts
When recreating designs, don’t worry about matching the exact font. That will only slow you down. The point of this exercise is to understand layout—not typography (we’ll cover that next).
Choose a basic font with a wide range of weights and widths. My go-to sans serif for this type of work is Futura, which is available in Adobe Fonts.
Also, avoid working with colour at this stage. Keeping everything in grayscale will make it easier to compare structure across different designs.
Step-by-Step Layout Recreation Process
Choose product to recreate and add it in your design program. Make the image slightly transparent and lock the layer.
Write out all the text used on the packaging you're recreating.
Overlay your text on top of the product photo to start matching placement.
Match letter case (uppercase, lowercase, or capitalized) for each element.
Adjust size by matching the height of the letters, rather than font size.
Adjust spacing between letters to match kerning as closely as possible.
Change the weight (bold/light) and width (condensed/extended) of the text.
If the packaging is round, match the centre letters first—they’ll be the least distorted.
By recreating these layouts in a stripped-down, neutral form, you’ll be able to focus purely on structure. This helps you see and understand the visual logic behind each design—and prepares you to make those decisions with confidence in your own work.
Examples
Byredo
Byredo uses a clean, Scandinavian minimalist layout that’s become iconic in the fragrance world. The brand name sits at the top, the fragrance name (slightly larger) is centred, and the product type appears at the bottom. This structure, paired with a simple sans serif font on a white sticker label, has become a widely adopted standard.
New Notes
New Notes follows nearly the same structure as Byredo—brand, product, type—with very similar scale and hierarchy. But rather than a sticker label, the gold text is screen printed directly onto a square black glass bottle, giving the design a more luxurious, tactile feel.
Phlur
Phlur also uses the same basic layout structure—brand, product name (larger), product type. However, the typography is wider and the spacing between lines is tighter, creating a more contemporary and compact feel.
D.S. & Durga
D.S. & Durga flips the order. The product name comes first and is much larger than the other text. The brand name and product type are grouped together at the bottom in smaller size, subtly shifting the visual hierarchy and making the product itself the focus.
Snif
Snif simplifies things further. The layout contains only the product name and brand name, with the product name set in wide and both in lowercase type. It’s a bold, clean look that fits with their playful, direct-to-consumer identity.
What You’re Learning By Doing This
Recreating layout forces you to slow down and make decisions intentionally. You start to notice:
How the order of elements affects what feels most important
How spacing and size communicate tone (e.g., luxury, clinical, fun)
How even small shifts in alignment or hierarchy change the overall feel
The goal of this exercise isn’t perfection—it’s perception. By stripping these designs down to their bare essentials, you’ll begin to see layout not as a passive structure, but as an active, strategic design choice.
In the next posts, we’ll start zooming in on the individual parts that make up these layouts—starting with spacing.
