Biota
Biota is a fictional pre-prepared meal subscription company, based on recipes that comply with the Blood Type Diet, that I created as part of my senior capstone project. For this capstone I was allowed to do any design project of my choice - it could focus on any field of design and be on any topic. As a child I had a lot of health issues and The Blood Type Diet, along with other alternative healing practices, was one of the things that I found truly healed me and helped me to feel my best. Unfortunately, the diet is extremely specific and it is is incredibly difficult to find any BTD friendly meal options when eating out, so when I am having a busy week and am unable to cook for myself, it is almost impossible to stick to the diet. I wanted to work on this project because it is a product that I very much wish existed in real life.
Process
It took awhile for me to settle on a name and color palette in the beginning. I created a wordlist of different food and blood/biology related words and phrases to try to find a good fit, eventually settling on Biota.
These were some of my early label prototypes. I wanted to test out different types of packaging labels and see how I was able to organize all the necessary information within these layouts. I had been pretty convinced of this tab style for the blood type information in the beginning, but ultimately it felt too simple and I wanted to push it farther.
I revisited the label designs and tried to focus on design concepts that really put emphasis on the individual blood type. This allowed me to create more colorful, visually-interesting layouts than the tab versions previous. The diagonal cut layout in the bottom left of this image ended up being the creative direction I moved forward with in the final packaging.
Final Project
The final logotype in simple but a bit serious and scientific. It also serves to highlight the B, O, and A, alluding to the main blood type groups, while also making use of the brand's diagonal motif. The color palette was selected in order to represent key attributes of each blood group's recommended diet, for example, Type A's thrive on a mainly plant-based vegetarian diet.
This is a breakdown of the final food packaging label and how I structured the information. I wanted the Blood Type to be large and clearly stated on the side of the package because the side view is what most people will see on a shelf. It was also important to me that the ingredient list be very prominent on top part of the label because I want people to be able to identify immediately what is in the dish.
Unfortunately, this is not exactly the kind of container I envisioned the Biota products being packaged in but when Coronavirus lockdowns hit my resources were limited so I had to make do with the container selection I had in my apartment. This is relatively the same size and shape of the container I planned on using so for the purposes of creating a mockup image of the packaging, I think this works for now.
In addition of the meal container labels I also created a series of drink labels keeping with the same general format. The only difference in the drink label is that the two-column ingredient list was cut down to one column since juices contain fewer ingredients and there was not as much horizontal space to work with. Also the blood group letter on the center panel was rotated to compliment the vertical nature of the bottle as well as save space.
