After reading Renata’s last post about Coca-Cola’s eco soda bottle, and the recent passing of Earth Day, I would like to take a moment to share with you another eco-friendly packaging concept. This one is also totally original as well as economical. Designer Patrick Sung has come up with a Universal Packaging System—packaging in the form of origami made with pre-folded sheets—which eliminates totality from the space lost in a carton.

Maybe companies will take notice and start using this type of packaging to ship things. Would you use a Universal Packaging System to ship your packages?

I am lucky enough to be surrounded by some amazing creative geniuses here at Canyon who’ve opened my eyes to some pretty cool creative things. Fonts, or typefaces as my friend Ryan calls them, are probably one of the most simple but impactful things marketers deal with daily.

Imagine my glee when I came across a tweet from the Harvard Business Journal regarding saving money and being green just by switching fonts!

The University of Wisconsin Green Bay IT department found that switching your outlook font from Arial to Century Gothic saves 30% more ink. Since ink accounts for 60% of a printed page this could offer major savings in the long-run.

Who would have thought such a simple thing could save you money? Better yet—include the message ‘Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This E-mail’ on you e-sig. That will help decrease printing altogether.

I like to think that designers are like super heroes. They have powers to change people’s perspectives and bring about a change. No, graphic design alone cannot save our planet but, it can definitely contribute to the cause.

Let’s talk about designer Andrew Kim and his Eco soda bottle concept. When it comes to beverages and packaging, the only square containers are juice boxes and milk, all other bottles are, for the most part, round. There is nothing wrong with round bottles—except that they are hard to ship.

So, Andrew designed a rectangular bottle made of 100% plant-based, sugar cane byproducts that is 100% recyclable. The rectangular bottle is made with a 25% slimmer cap, which is stackable and also collapsible when empty.

With the more efficient design, an additional 3,949 bottles can be shipped per shipping container. And, the new design would eliminate the carbon footprint of shipping more than 320 million bottles a year.

I hope soda manufacturers will be inspired by this design and think about how they can improve the world around us by reinventing their products.

In my last blog post I discussed the importance of proofreading before submitting a project to a designer.

Let’s talk about planning ahead again. This time let’s take on the headline. I’ve coined a term here at Canyon and we see it come up from time to time. It’s the dreaded “paragraph headline”—a headline that was born a paragraph and destined for a really small font size.

A headline is successful if it grabs the reader’s attention and gets them to read the copy. It’s especially successful if it prompts a follow-through response on your call to action.

Designers can deal with headlines of any length. But, we like to have them nailed down before we start designing. That gives us time to figure out how to express the headline visually.

To quote a post from Ted Nicholas, “you should go to copywriting jail if your headline is longer than 17 words.” I tend to agree with Ted. If you’re guilty of this, don’t worry, I’ve heard that copywriting jail isn’t that bad, days are spent sharpening government pencils and weekends at home writing mandatory public service blog posts.

Some say a long headline allows the reader to qualify themselves and weed out the “tire kickers” from the get go. So sadly, the dreaded “paragraph headline” may not be as dreadful as I once thought.

But this post is really about “What to do BEFORE you design.” Designers can make headlines work no matter what length. Just figure it out before you send it to a designer so we can aim for that ever-awesome marriage of visual elements and words. For examples of this, see Renata’s previous post, B2B Advertising Can Be Sexy. Great ads!