Creative design of color palettes for product packaging

Abstract

This paper describes our latest work on assisting CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) companies with their product packaging designs by providing color palettes that are visually appealing, novel and consistent with desired marketing messages for a particular brand and product. Specifically, we start by mining a large collections of images of different products and brands to learn about all the colors and color combinations that frequently appear among them. Meanwhile, a color-message graph is constructed to represent messages conveyed by different colors as well as to capture the interrelationship among them. Knowledge from both color psychology and information sources like Thesaurus are extensively exploited in this case. Now, given a particular product and brand to be designed for its packaging, along with the company's desired marketing message, we apply a computational method to generate quintillions of novel color palettes that can be used for the design. This process will leverage existing palettes used by same products of different brands or different products of the same brand, take in optional color preferences from users, identify then utilize the right colors to convey the desired marketing message. Finally, we rank the palettes based on assessment of their visual aesthetics, novelty and the way that different messages of the same palette interact with each other, so as to guide human designers to choose the right ones. Our initial demonstrations of this work to colleagues of subject matter have received very positive feedback. We are now exploring opportunities to collaborate with them to validate this technology in a controlled experimental setting.