Shelf Impact! is evolving to serve you better

If the design team bases the color it has selected for a multi-layer plastic container on aesthetic considerations, without understanding something about how the individual layers work together as a team, the color shade or robustness could be other than what was intended. If highly detailed graphic designs on a shrink-sleeve label don’t account for distortion when the label is shrunk, the printed results could be disastrous.

These are just some of the issues we’ve been covering over the past six years in Shelf Impact! For the past three years, we’ve published a quarterly supplement tucked inside of Packaging World. But along the way, we’ve learned a few things from you, our readers:

• The nuances of package design aren’t just for the “creative” types. Increasingly, a packaging manager or a project supervisor wants to know the ins and outs just as much as a brand manager or a design director. In fact, more keyword searches are done each month at packworld.com under “package design” than any other topic.More packaging professionals are recognizing that decisions made during the earliest stages of package creation can affect the entire value chain. If the design team bases the color it has selected for a multi-layer plastic container on aesthetic considerations, without understanding something about how the individual layers work together as a team, the color shade or robustness could be other than what was intended. If highly detailed graphic designs on a shrink-sleeve label don’t account for distortion when the label is shrunk, the printed results could be disastrous. These are just some of the issues we’ve been covering over the past six years in Shelf Impact! For the past three years, we’ve published a quarterly supplement tucked inside of Packaging World. But along the way, we’ve learned a few things from you, our readers:

• The nuances of package design aren’t just for the “creative” types. Increasingly, a packaging manager or a project supervisor wants to know the ins and outs just as much as a brand manager or a design director. In fact, more keyword searches are done each month at packworld.com under “package design” than any other topic.

• This broad spectrum of packaging professionals that crave solid analysis about the package-creation process and overarching consumer trends is reinforced by our Shelf Impact! Package Design Workshop series. In workshop after workshop, attendees from design managers to innovation gurus to packaging engineers engage in rich discussions about what makes for great packaging on shelf, and why other packages fail in their marketing objectives.

• Packaging professionals elsewhere in the value chain have expressed an interest in learning the language of branding and design teams, and how and why they reach the creative decisions they do.

Shelf Impact! is responding to these information needs by changing how we present the content you want. Shelf Impact! , beginning with this issue, will publish as its own branded section each quarter within the pages of Packaging World, instead of as a separate supplement. We’re excited about this change because it expands Shelf Impact! ’s reach to the more than 70,000 readers of Packaging World. This section also will be available in a digital format on shelfimpact.com

You will continue to find Shelf Impact! e-newsletters in your mailbox twice each month and on shelfimpact.com. In addition, we’re planning another powerful “road tour” of Package Design Workshops in 2011, and we have an exciting new product in the works … more details to come.

In short, Shelf Impact! is becoming a more robust brand, working even more closely with Packaging World to provide an integrated offering of the information your cross-functional team needs to create packages that bring bottom-line results.

Enjoy the read and the creative journey. Please contact me at george@packworld.com to discuss how we can continue to better serve your information needs.