Every packaging design starts with the same question: can the product be bigger
On almost every packaging project the same note comes back: the product could be a bit bigger. The photo on the front needs to dominate, because people have to see straight away what is in the box. It sounds logical. It is also the kind of feedback that is hard to push back on as a designer, because it feels right.
There is measurable evidence now that it is not right. Not from an agency study with a conclusion that happens to support its own service list, but from eye-tracking work where participants look at a real shelf setup while a camera logs where their eyes land, how long they stay and in what order. That produces something a taste discussion cannot: a ranking.
For six years I ran that discussion on gut feel, simply because the data was not there. Now some of it is.
Buyers look at your brand name twice as long as your product photo
In an eye-tracking study on dairy packaging forty participants viewed a two-row shelf setup while their gaze was tracked. The researchers split each pack into areas: brand name, product photo, ingredients, flavour description and calorie information. Then they measured how long the eye stayed on each area.
The brand name won by a distance. It drew more than twice the viewing time of the product photo and close to twenty times that of the calorie information, which was almost entirely ignored. The brand name is also the only area that comes out separately in statistical terms: between the product photo and the flavour description there was no meaningful difference.
That is an uncomfortable result for the way many packs get built. The usual order is a large product image first, then the logo somewhere above or below, then everything else fitted around it. The research suggests the reverse. The brand name is where the eye goes, so that is where you make the difference.
In practice this means the typography of your brand name is not a finishing touch but the core of the design. If your name sits in a generic sans that could belong to three competitors, then the area that gets the most attention is exactly the area where you say nothing. That is also why a brand is more than a logo: on shelf the lettering does the work, not the mark in your brand guide.
And it answers the question we opened with. If your client wants the product bigger, the counter question is: bigger at the cost of what? If the answer is "at the cost of the brand name", you are shrinking the area the buyer actually looks at.
The sustainable design your client asks for costs attention
The same study compared three design styles in the same product category: an eco-minimal variant, a plain variant and a variant with a character on it. On total viewing time the eco variant clearly lost. The gap with the plain variant ran to a little over half a second per pack, close to a third less attention, and that difference was meaningful.
The researchers explain it through the minimalism itself: designs that put the ecological message first tend to choose calm, unbleached board, little colour and a lot of white. It reads as honest. It also stands out less.
This is a result I take seriously because it cuts against our own content line. We write regularly about packing more sustainably and about the rules recyclable design has to meet. That line stands. But we assumed too easily that a sustainable look is free in attention terms. It is not.
The point is not that you should avoid a minimal design. The point is that you know the bill and pay it somewhere else. Unbleached board with brown lettering is not sustainable and subtle, it is sustainable and invisible.
The same comparison produces one more result, and here I part ways with what the researchers write in their own summary. They call the character design the winner. Their figures do not: the gap with the plain design is eleven milliseconds and their test places the two in the same group. Having a mascot drawn pays off through brand recognition over time, not through attention on shelf today. So do not sell it as an attention grabber.
A window beats the best product photo
The second study is sharper and more recent. In a quasi-experiment with chocolate packs one hundred and sixty participants each saw one pack in a sound-proofed lab setup, for thirty seconds, wearing a portable eye tracker. The researchers varied two things: whether the product was visible through a real window or only as a photo on the box, and whether the pack unit was small or large.
The window won on everything they measured. The eye landed on it more than twice as fast as on the product photo. Total viewing time on the window was substantially higher. And the effect did not stop at attention: participants who saw the real product scored higher on expected quality, higher on expected taste and higher on purchase intention than participants who saw the same chocolate as a photo. All differences were statistically meaningful. The reported effect sizes are so high that I do not trust them, but the direction is not in question.
This is also not the only study on the subject, and they do not all point the same way. Earlier work in Frontiers in Psychology concluded that a window does not always capture attention and that the effect depends on what you let people see through it. The thread that holds: a window works when the product looks appealing. For something that looks messy, pale or irregular, it works against you.
There was also an interaction that sharpens the advice. Small pack units only performed better when the product was visible. Without a window that advantage vanished completely: small and closed did no better than large and closed. For chocolates and snacks that is directly usable. For capsules and supplements I would not simply assume it, because that is a different purchase motivation than chocolate.
That makes it a structural decision, not a finishing choice. Whether a window or a cut-out goes into the pack is settled early in the project, because it touches the die line, the material, the filling line and the unit cost. It is exactly the kind of choice you cannot reverse later without redoing everything. Anyone working out what packaging design returns should carry this on the benefit side, not only as extra tooling cost.
No window? Then the photo has to imitate one
A window is not always possible. With powders, fresh products, contents sensitive to light or fat, and with many mono-material solutions, the option is out. And on the digital shelf it does not exist at all: in a marketplace search result you see a thumbnail of the pack, not a physical cut-out.
That is where the advice turns. When the window drops away, the product photo is the only carrier of visibility, and then that photo has to close the gap the research shows. This is not a plea for a tidier photo. It is a plea for a photo that does what a window does: show the product as it really is, at true scale, with texture you can almost feel.
That is also where the debate about generated imagery lands. I am not against AI imagery and I use it myself for variants and tests. But in the place where the image has to replace the window, the place where the buyer decides whether this is real, a real product photo that converts beats a picture that looks roughly right. The situation decides the choice, not the principle.
On marketplaces there is something else on top. The thumbnail sits beside dozens of near-identical competitor thumbnails, often on the same white background at the same angle. That is one of the reasons brands leave money on the table on marketplaces: they run exactly the same generic presentation as everyone else. The shelf at home and the shelf in the app do not ask for the same image, but they do ask for the same decision: where should the eye land first.
How much ink your film takes before the pack counts as non-recyclable
Suppose you follow the advice above and compensate a calm sustainable design with a full, dark colour field. On flexible packaging you then run into a limit few designers know about.
The design rules for coloured PE films set a ceiling on the amount of ink and varnish on the film, expressed as a share of the pack. Stay below it and nothing happens. Sit in the middle band and it costs you a class in the assessment. Go over and the pack counts as non-recyclable. It also states that a paper label on a PE pouch is disqualifying, exactly the trick many brands use to make a pouch look greener.
For cartons a similar limit runs through fibre content. The 4evergreen design guide draws the line for normal paper processing at eighty percent paper: everything you add in laminate, coating, window, tape and ribbon eats into that margin. The same guide carries a warning about carbon black based inks, which hits a much-requested premium look: the black box.
This is why I do not treat attention and material as separate conversations. The advice to compensate minimalism with contrast is only usable if you say how. Contrast through a solid black field on mono-PE can cost you your recyclability claim. Contrast through a pronounced shape, a bright spot colour on a small area or unprinted film used as a colour field costs you almost nothing in recyclability. A cut-out does cost something, because it eats into your fibre margin. That is a trade-off, not a free trick. Know the limit before the artwork is finished, not after.
Where this research stops
Both studies are lab work, and that is precisely why they are usable: the alternative is taste. But the limits belong in the story.
Participants sit in a quiet room, get a pack in front of them for half a minute or less, and decide nothing with their own money. A supermarket shelf or a search result on your phone is busier, faster and messier.
The samples are also small and not Dutch. The dairy study worked with forty participants, which is few, and with international students in Korea looking at local brands. The chocolate study had a broader setup with one hundred and sixty participants and a sample size calculated in advance, but ran on Chinese students. That the results transfer one to one to a Dutch buyer over thirty has not been shown. Both papers also carry reporting sloppiness: the dairy study switches from seconds to milliseconds between two tables without saying so, and the chocolate study reports an effect size that cannot be right.
The main caveat: this is evidence of attention, not evidence of revenue. Viewing time and self-reported purchase intention are predictors, not receipts. Anyone promising that a window lifts your sales by a specific percentage is inventing that percentage.
So why is it usable? Because the alternative is worse. The choices at stake here, the size of the brand name against the product photo, window or no window, calm or high contrast, are currently settled almost entirely on taste. An imperfect measurement is a better conversation partner than no measurement.
The moodboard is no longer step one for us
Concretely it changes our order. We no longer open a project with a moodboard but with the question of which area on the front becomes the attention anchor, and for us that is the brand name by default unless there is a reason to deviate. Image comes after that, then the rest.
We raise the window question early, together with the printer and the filler, because the answer sets the die line. On small units we push towards a visible product, because that is the combination that makes the biggest difference in the research. If it cannot be done, budget shifts to photography that imitates the window rather than to another design round.
When a client asks for a sustainable, calm look, we name the attention cost out loud and look for the compensation inside the material limits. We would rather have that conversation up front than at the first disappointing shelf figures. If you want to look more broadly at what is moving in the field first: our overview of packaging design trends sets out the directions.
If you are working on a new pack, or an existing line is not performing as expected, we are happy to look with you. We do packaging design and the brand building around it together, because the buyer on shelf makes no distinction between the two. Book a call and bring your current pack, physical or as artwork.
