NUTRILIVIN

A supplement brand that incorporates characters into its design, connecting their traits to the different supplements they release.

Meet the Characters

Justin Calloway

A soft-spoken and fashionable wood elf that enjoys the relaxing characteristics of ginseng and connects his body to the tranquility of nature, like how his hair flows like a waterfall.

Jeff Spokesman

A civil engineer who graduated from NJIT, aiming to focus on whatever is around him. Brain fog may overcome him, but he uses his superhuman intelligence to split his work into multiple tasks.

Salvatore Lacksey

A verklempt, hard-working industrial designer who never lets his ADD interfere with his work. He is very hands on with the tools he uses and makes good time for his bio-breaks.

Kingsley GalaSpark

A psychologist and recording artist who, like the other three, works out on a daily basis, and for a Galaga, he's got such great coordination! Though you may be frightened by his appearance at first, he is a very intelligent partner to work with. Yeah, even he needs the same vitamins we humans need.

The sketch of the four characters.

The process

When working on this project, my aim was to first focus on the supplements and do research on what supplement contains which ingredients that will help improve a person's wellbeing. When connecting my characters to the project, I made sure the supplements aligned with their characteristics/traits.

What inspired this project?

When my instructor was presenting example projects to give the class inspiration, the ones that struck out to me were “character advertising” and “packaging design”, although I didn't want to go for packaging, as in boxes. I decided to focus more on the “character advertising” part.

The problem with character advertising, as I had found out in an image search, is that they are only seen on kids’ culinary items at your local supermarket. It was Charlie John Melendez that was my greatest inspiration for the project, as he is a very talented character artist.

The other thing I had in mind was wellbeing, and since I always prioritize good health, I figured it would be a great idea to incorporate that into the project.

Brainstorming

When brainstorming the supplements, I came up with as many as 11 different specific supplements, such as iron, magnesium, calcium, etc. Because I had four characters and wanted to keep all of my supplement ideas, I decided to come up with a 12th one to make them equal (that one was testosterone). My biggest challenge was assigning the supplements to each character, since they all need the same types. For instance, all four of the characters I use work out regularly, but I ended up assigning “MUSCLES” to King GalaSpark.

Word as Image

To make the label design look more interesting, I didn’t want to focus on using type alone, but rather tweaking up the type, or adding a bit of texture to it, so to make it look like I’m doing a “word as image” graphic. For instance, the word “HAIR” was converted from straight to curvy by the addition of anchor points; the same thing applied to “skin”, in which I made it look as soft as human skin.

The backgrounds for each label are colored accordingly: Jungle green for Justin, teal for Jeff, cobalt for Sal, and muted grape for GalaSpark. This way, each element in front can be seen clearly

Finding the Perfect Mockup

It was hard to find a good one, as a lot of pill bottles nowadays are made of plastic. I decided to specifically make it a glass pill bottle, not because they’re vintage, but because it’s a more sustainable material. There were a few obstacles in my way:

Only certain sites had that type of mockup.
Yellow Images turned out not to be the right source for me (all I got was a single .tiff file, and no .psd file like the seller promised).
Most 3D models of pill bottles aren’t perfect.

What I ended up doing was getting the mockup off of Creative Market, and it made things much easier. Either way, that was when I learned that Yellow Images is a scam site.

Audience

Aside from creative directors, my ideal audience would be wellness customers who are looking to improve their lifestyle and wellbeing with certain supplements. While character advertising is the principal idea, my aim isn’t simply to focus on the characters themselves, but how each supplement relates to all four of those characters. Each one gets three apiece for a total of twelve different supplements.

The labels

The ideal concept I had was to put the character to the left and the typography to the right. The aim was to use relatively high contrast, involving a darker background color and brighter text colors. While the text may be small, the bright colors are to ensure readability.

The disclaimers and facts are left blank just because this is a concept.

When making the labels, I also did some research on what each supplement should consist of (i.e. its leading ingredients) and whatever their function is (in this case, the Focus supplement helps improve concentration)