Packaging guidelines in the brandbook

What must necessarily be recorded in the packaging section

If there are no figures in the guidelines, it is not a guideline, but a beautiful presentation. The contractor who receives such a document is forced to guess, and he does not guess in your favor. The minimum set of parameters without which the packaging section does not work:

• minimum and maximum size of the logo in mm for each type of packaging;
• size of the protective field with indication of which element of the logo it is calculated from;
• margins from the edge of the packaging, fold, seam and engraving line;
• priority logo placement — usually the top left corner of the front side;
• requirement for readability of the mark from all visible sides of the packaging, not only from the front;
• hierarchy of textual information — name, volume, composition, barcode — with indication of what is more important in size and placement.

It is necessary to separately specify the minimum sizes: for souvenirs and small products the logo can be reduced to 5 mm, for standard product packaging the lower boundary is 20–25 mm. Below these values the mark loses readability when printed, especially on textured materials.

How to calculate the protective field and where mistakes are most often made

The protective field is not "air around the logo at a glance", but a value tied to a specific element of the mark. For example, in the IEK brandbook, the minimum protective field equals the width of the letter "E" from the logo. For other brands, it may be the height of a lowercase letter or the width of an internal element of the symbol — the principle is the same: the field scales together with the logo, not remaining a fixed number in millimeters.

A typical mistake is to set the protective field as "10 mm" without linking it to the logo size. When reducing the mark to 15 mm, such a field visually "eats" the packaging, and when increasing to 100 mm, it becomes invisible and does not protect the mark from adjacent elements — text, barcode, ornament. A second common error is calculating the field from the visual dimensions of the logo, not from a letter standard: this leads to a variation of 20–30% between executors who interpret "at a glance".

Types of packaging — and why different rules are needed for them

There is no single set of rules for the entire product line. A product has individual packaging, group (a box for several units) and transport (pallet, for logistics) — and the logo works differently on each of them.

This also applies to stickers: the guideline should separately describe the three variants — individual, group and transport, because the label size, information density and logo placement on them are fundamentally different. If this section is omitted, the marketing department has to reinvent how to apply the sticker to the pallet each time, and they do it differently from batch to batch.

Scaling the product line: how the guideline should anticipate this

The problem usually emerges not at the start, but after a year or two, when the product line grows from 3 SKU to 30. A guideline written 'for three products' begins to crack: there are not enough rules for new packaging volumes, new form factors, new color codes to distinguish flavors or series.

A working approach is to build into the guideline not specific sizes for the current assortment, but formulas and ranges. Not 'the logo is 30 mm on a 200 g pack', but 'the logo occupies no less than 8% of the facade width, but no less than 20 mm and no more than 60 mm'. Such a formula can be applied to any new format without revising the entire document. It is also important to separately define the color coding system for new items in the product line — it should be expandable according to a clear algorithm, not invented each time by a new designer.

Printing technology and file preparation for the printer

Here begins the area that most brandbooks simply don’t touch, and it is precisely this that most often ruins the result. The screen layout and packaging in the buyer’s hands are different objects in terms of color physics. The CMYK palette covers approximately 70% of colors from the Pantone system, which means that one-third of the brand’s colors inevitably "floats" when translated to print if this is not anticipated in advance.

The material intensifies the difference: kraft paper and cardboard absorb ink more strongly, which leads to a decrease in color saturation compared to the screen or glossy paper. A logo that looks vividly blue on the website becomes pale gray-blue on a kraft box — unless compensating CMYK values are specified in the guidelines specifically for this type of material.

What should be included in the section on printing:

1. separate color profiles for offset printing, flexography, and deep printing — different technologies transmit halftones and fine text differently;
2. corrected CMYK values for kraft paper, cardboard, film — separately from the base brand palette;
3. requirements for resolution and vector file formats for the printer (usually PDF/X-1a or EPS, without raster substitutes for the logo);
4. tolerances for color alignment — by how many percent deviation is considered normal for a specific run size.

Errors by contractors — and how to close them at the document level

Even a detailed guideline won’t help if the contractor doesn’t open it or interprets it loosely. Practice shows the same failures from project to project:

• incorrectly calculated margins from the edge of the packaging — the logo "overlaps" the fold or embossing;
• ignoring the printing technology — the layout is approved on screen, not for a specific machine;
• using a logo in a non-original size — a stretched or compressed file instead of a vector master layout;
• not observing distances between elements — text and logo merge when the packaging is reduced in size;
• incorrect information hierarchy — the brand name gets lost next to a large barcode or promotional sticker.

This is not prevented by increasing the volume of text in the guideline, but rather by the opposite — a strict table of allowable values with examples of 'correct/incorrect' and a mandatory checklist for approving the layout before printing the batch. The contractor must physically check off each item, rather than read the descriptive text and interpret it on their own.