GD 2 Project 3: Chocolate Brand Packaging

The chocolate tasting is where this project begins, and I mean that literally. Before students sketch anything, they taste. Not casually — attentively. I ask them to notice the high notes and the low notes, whether it melts or crunches, what they smell before they taste, what lingers after. Every sensory nuance is a design problem. Texture in the packaging can convey texture in the chocolate. Color can carry flavor. Students arrive at this project having already built a brand identity in Project 2 — the logo work is done. What the chocolate project asks is whether that identity can survive translation into something physical, tactile, and three-dimensional. That is a different and harder question.

The hand-made element, which is new in 2026, is essential to how I run this project, though the specific method varies. Frottage, monoprinting, and other mark-making techniques are among the options — what matters is that students produce something with their hands that the screen could not have generated. A mark made by pressing, rubbing, or printing carries the history of how it was made. That specificity gives the final packaging a material voice that no stock library or AI tool can replicate.

The audience — women 35 and older — is deliberately outside most students' comfort zone. It is easy to design for yourself. When the audience is someone outside your age range and reference points, you have to do the research. Students who do it produce work with a specificity that is immediately visible in critique. Students who don't design for themselves and call it premium.