Sustainable Materials Presentation
Going beyond specs to help brands navigate the materials phase of a sustainable packaging project.
ART DIRECTOR • DESIGNER • RESEARCHER
Opportunity
Guacamole Airplane is a design studio that’s focused on sustainable packaging. One of my first projects with them was redesigning the Material Review presentation that they show to clients. Materials dictate a lot about how packaging is engineered and designed, so this presentation comes before any in-depth design work. The goal of the presentation is to guide clients through many sustainability grey areas, and empower them with enough information to choose the best materials to meet their goals.
Execution
Choosing more sustainable materials means understanding their impact and implications throughout the entire supply chain. Supply chains are complex — none of it is cut-and-dry. On the contrary, choosing materials is all about navigating nuance and balancing tradeoffs.
This redesign started in spreadsheets. By refining the back end data, I could get a complete picture of all the information and start to parse it out. Not only that, it was much easier to scale the presentation when working from an up-to-date material database.
To navigate grey area, I start with comparison and context. For comparison, each material section starts with tables comparing similar attributes of all the material options in one place. Then, on each material’s spotlight slide, there was space for context.
To avoid late-stage bottlenecks, each spotlight slide addressed common concerns and questions for each client stakeholder: designers, customer experience team, operations, and finance. In addition to the end-of-life options listed on each spotlight page, there is an entire End-of-life section dedicated to feasibility based on historical recovery rates.
Process
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After collecting years of material information, there are bound to be some redundancies. I gathered and organized the specs and data to have a reputable base of information to work from.
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With data and specs in place, it was time to start digesting information like for like. How does one material look or feel different from another? How is it best disposed? Is the ideal disposal method accessible to most customers?
I grouped each of these material attributes into categories: material, manufacturing, end-of-life. At the beginning of each section, information is grouped by these categories with tables to compare one material to another.
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Each material has its own spotlight slide which leaves us space to add more context. This is the place for all the ifs, ands, and buts. In addition to a complete specs panel, we contextualize the pros and cons that are hidden between the lines of the specs. Each spotlight slide is followed with a gallery to show the material in its different forms and textures, with details about customization capabilities.
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More and more, consumers want to do the right thing for their packaging and do the best they can to divert it from landfill. But even with the best of intentions, access to composting and recycling varies widely from city to city. The end-of-life section in the presentation provides a feasibility big picture so that clients can look through the lens of their customers around the world.
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Sustainable Supplier Guide
A sustainable packaging supplier guide, redesigned for consistency, more robust guidance, and SEO.
PROJECT MANAGER • ART DIRECTOR • WRITER
Opportunity
The Guacamole Airplane Supplier Guide is one of the main ways that clients’ discover the studio online. The supplier directory spotlights dozens of sustainable packaging suppliers that are manufacturing materials like plant-based plastic film alternatives, mushroom foam, and paper made from hemp waste.
The team wanted to give the Supplier Guide a face lift and make it easier to browse.
Execution
From the start, a few goals of the new supplier guide design were to make the individual supplier pages more consistent, increase SEO potential, and make it easier to browse.
Many suppliers don’t have high quality photography, so one of the first things I did was make the index page less reliant on imagery. The clickable categories up top also make the index page easier to navigate without too much scrolling.
Guacamole Airplane has met with many of the suppliers in the directory, so they have a unique, first hand take on what makes them great. So we added a “What we like about” section on the top of each page where the team can offer personal insight.
The biggest addition to the individual supplier pages was product blocks. A lot of the products are made from new materials that folks may not be familiar with. These product blocks give Guacamole Airplane the opportunity to offer some education and guidance about what to consider.
Process
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I brought Guacamole Airplane’s supplier spreadsheet into Airtable to better segment and scale the data. A big part of this was deciding how to consistently name product. We decided on “material + structure” format.
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With dozens of supplier pages to create, the design had to be completely dialed in before we started populating the guide. I tried different information hierarchies to dial in a design that would scale to suite all suppliers.
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Finally, we got down to business, dividing and tackling each section to populate each supplier’s page. I templatized copy where possible. For example, sustainability and disposal information is the same for most paper-based boxes. But the films category was much more nuanced since there are so many different source materials and certifications in play.
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