Tote Bag Design

Project Summary

In January 2022. Kaufland Croatia published a design competition for students under the slogan: "Students, do you think green?". The assignment was to design an environmentally friendly tote bag. There were four themes to pick from:

1. biodiversity
2. climate protection
3. food waste
4. recycling plastic

I chose climate protection theme, because I felt I could capture the importance of the things that affect the climate in good or neutral way.

After choosing the theme, the first step towards creating a solution was brainstorming. I wrote down everything that came to mind when thinking about climate change and climate protection. For instance, renewable energy, public transportation, planting trees and similar things found a place on the paper.

Research

Brainstorming session put things in motion. There were couple ideas brewing in my head while I moved on to the next step: research. To see which direction my design should go, I asked myself these three questions:

1. "What kind of customers would buy the designed tote bags?"
2. "What would be the best suited design for already existing Kaufland brand?" and
3. "What do other supermarkets tote bags look like?"

Naturally, the research was conducted in three parts, each focused on answering the questions above. Most of the information about Kaufland's brand I found on their website and their social media was helpful in researching the customers. I also had their regular tote bag to study and nudge my design in the direction of their brand.

The third part of research focused on the competition and what could make my design equally good or, if possible, better than theirs. I conducted it by googling competitors tote bags, and by examining the ones I had at home.

Design Process

After the thorough research, I went back to the brainstorming session notes. I felt like I have enough information about the brand, the customers, the competition, the standard of tote bag design and things connected to climate protection.

Next step was to boost the creativity with Crazy Eights. During that exercise, I poured everything from my brain to a piece of paper folded three times in half in a way that formed eight little sections.

Some ideas were silly, some ideas were good but not optimal for the customers average age, and one idea clicked like it was perfect. It was mosaic, a bit like the official tote bag, but in hexagons that are part of a honeycomb. Each hexagon represented an action we could take, or support, for climate protection. The color I wanted to use was light green to emphasize the slogan of the competition: Think green.

The list of actions represented in the design:

1. Solar energy
2. Wind energy
3. Planting trees
4. Saving electricity/power
5. Using public transport
6. Electric vehicles
7. Biking
8. Using reusable (tote) bags
9. Recycling

The tenth element of the design is a bee. The bee can represent two things:

• It can be a regular bee who is positively affected by these actions contained in the honeycomb.
• It can also represent the customer - a person who is doing his part helping the climate by recycling or by reusing a tote bag instead of buying a plastic bag.

For creating the design, I followed the instructions written in the competition (regarding size, colors and such). The tool I used for designing the solution was Adobe Illustrator.

Final Design

"Think green" translated to Croatian is "Mislimo zeleno", but because there is a bee in the design, I used a play on words and made a smaller 'z' in front of 'zeleno'. That way it looked like the bee is buzzing the slogan. To make the design more suitable for their brand, I used Kaufland's font and typed the slogan in a similar way it is shown on their reusable bag above.

After finishing the design I wanted to know how it would look on an actual tote bag. So I looked for mockups on Freepik and Unsplash, and used Adobe Photoshop to put my design on the mockups.