Aero StudioCalder
Artwork that required a designer for every new product, replaced by a system that does not.
The situation
Calder makes chilled prepared foods sold through independent grocers and a handful of regional supermarket chains. When we met them they had six products and firm plans for forty within two years.
The existing packaging was attractive and completely unscalable. Each pack was a bespoke illustration, commissioned individually, with typography positioned by eye. Adding a product meant a four-week lead time and a freelance illustrator. Nobody had thought about what forty of these would look like sitting next to each other on a shelf, because until recently there had only ever been six.
Constraints we started from
- Three pack formats — sleeve, pouch, rigid tray — with very different printable areas.
- Statutory information that varies by market and consumes a fixed, non-negotiable amount of space.
- Print via three suppliers with different colour capabilities; one could not hold a consistent spot colour across runs.
- A production schedule where new flavours are signed off six weeks before they hit shelves.
That last one was the real design brief. Whatever we produced had to be executable by a production coordinator, not a designer, in an afternoon.
The system
We built the range around a fixed structural grid that stays identical across all three formats, with a single variable: a colour field whose hue identifies the product category and whose height varies with the amount of statutory text required. Everything else — logo position, product name, weight, the required declarations — sits in defined slots.
Illustration was replaced by a photographic approach with a specified shooting setup: fixed camera height, fixed lighting, a defined background. This was the contentious decision and we lost the first two arguments about it. What settled it was a shelf mock-up. Six bespoke illustrations look like craft; forty look like a jumble sale.
For the supplier who could not hold a spot colour reliably, we defined the palette so that the categories remain distinguishable even with a noticeable shift — the hues are far enough apart that a drift of several percent does not turn one category into another.
Handover
The deliverable was a set of templates plus a twelve-page working document — not brand guidelines in the usual sense, but instructions. Which slot takes what. How to decide the colour field height. What to send the printer. What to do when a product name is too long, which happens more often than anyone expects.
We ran two training sessions with the production team and then deliberately stepped back for the next four launches, reviewing them afterwards rather than during. Three of the four needed no correction. The fourth revealed an ambiguity in the document, which we fixed.
Outcome
- New product artwork: four weeks and a freelance illustrator → one afternoon, in-house.
- Range grew from six to thirty-one products without further design involvement.
- Print costs down through palette consolidation across the range.