Big Cat is a premium pet food line targeted towards pet owners with overweight cats. The ingredients that go into making Big Cat are filling and help your overweight cat eat less.
Each package design contains unique patterns that show pet owners the ingredients in the cat food.
The back of the packaging explains how the ingredients help your cat lose weight. Furthermore, each large bag of food has a portion control chart as well as games to help your cat lose weight.
BRANDING
This mark came pretty early in the process when designing the project. I tried sketching other logos and ideas but none felt quite as right as this initial sketch.
Big Cat’s mark is a play on the letter B. It visualizes a heart and the playful use of cat ears to demonstrate the love we have for our cats, big or small.
The other colors were chosen based on the ingredients used throughout the different packages. For example, pink was used for salmon and red for meat.
The beige accent was chosen because it was a light color that was a good contrast to the other colors used in the brand.
The core brand color, Avocado Green, is used throughout all the packaging and the website. The packaging had a multitude of colors because of the ingredients. Avocado Green helped to emphasize the main ingredient in Big Cat’s food, but also helped tie the packaging together.
Each Big Cat packaging piece contains a pattern. Each pattern is unique to the ingredients used in the product.
The only ingredient to repeat itself consistently is the avocado cat paw.
PACKAGING
The most economical idea was to have scoops that would come with each large bag to make portion sizes easy to measure. The fun part with the scoops is that they would resemble one of the ingredients. For the salmon, a fish shape would be the scoop, and for the chicken, a chicken leg shape would be used for the scoop.
Big Cat’s packaging design went through a lot of stages. One of the most important things in maintaining a healthy weight for your cat is portions. I wanted this to be an important part of the packaging. I experimented with the idea of a measuring unit on items such as Pringle cans but those packages were too small for large food bags.
To make the pattern more than just a design element, each package design highlights the ingredients in the pattern on the back and explains why it is healthy for your cat.
We were asked to create wet food packaging that wasn’t a standard wet food can like you can buy in stores. However, for me, the size of the standard wet can food was perfect. They are created so each can is a meal for your cat. To still have the size but something a little different I cut down Pringle cans to size. I spray painted the lids with the light beige color I had been using as an accent. I used the same method for the catnip but used a small Pringle can which prevented me from cutting anything down.
