K-cup packaging design for Queen Bee Coffee

I love a good design challenge – when McDonough’s local coffee shop Queen Bee Coffee got in touch for a custom K-Cup Packaging Design project, I was so in.

The production quantities? Huge. The printer? Somewhere I couldn’t travel to for a press check.

You know I said yes.

Our K-Cup Packaging Design project started with the most basic sketch – Micah had a general idea where he wanted certain design elements to hit, and he scrawled those onto an existing coffee pod package. From there, I researched the correct die lines to use for our project, or the outlines the printer would use to cut out our package design on the cardstock it was printed on.

From there, I laid out all of the branding elements, text, and placeholders where they needed to go. Just like for my mural projects, I needed to work in a smaller scale so I could print out this box and assemble it periodically. That way I could make sure the folds at the bottom were correct, and the artwork all sat right where it was supposed to. That was especially tricky when it came to making sure the bee logo on the top flap lined up right with the rest of the bee on the front of the box! We really wanted it to be a seamless transition, and printing out the artwork to fold up a tiny version on letter-sized paper ensured that.

We were also able to see a tiny version of the artwork next to the existing bags of coffee that Queen Bee Coffee sells. Through that, we finessed the placement of the bee and label for consistency and were able to make sure everything would look just right when sitting on the shelf in their coffee shops.

I love the sense of fun Queen Bee Coffee brings to everything they do, and I super love that they asked for friendly messages to their customers inside the K-Cup packaging design. Again – it was a ton of laying out the hand painted illustrated elements I created and hand lettering just so, printing out the package design, and assembling it in studio to make sure all of this would work in production with zero room for errors. Measure twice, cut once my friends.

It paid off – look at how lovely the inside of the actual coffee pod box turned out!

I can’t wait to show you where those hand painted coffee tree elements inside the coffee pod box are going to turn up next! In the meantime, you can grab a box of Queen Bee Coffee pods next time you’re in McDonough or Forsyth, Georgia.

Ready to start your next design project? You can get in touch with me here to get started.