Gabriela Perez is a designer specializing in illustration and animation.
Package Design | Branding | Illustration
From March 2020 to June 2020, I had a unique opportunity to intern with Innovation First International. There, I worked within their creative team at HexBug as a graphic design/packaging design intern. Throughout this internship, I was able to work on several different products; I did everything from innovating on old designs to updating existing packaging, and even to creating packaging designs from scratch! I was primarily led by the Design Director, Elizabeth Ursini.
Below is the Ultimate Insect Bundle, a product I designed by taking ideas from an assortment of HexBug products and combining them to create a unique package and product identity.
For the Ultimate Insect Bundle, I collaborated with the creative team and HexBug’s internal 3D team led by Ramlah Shehata. I wanted to include some of the more animated graphic elements HexBug used for its new product identities. You can see some of those graphic elements in the design below and check out the animation that inspired this packaging here. While working with the 3D team I also staged the real-life toys and mocked them up in Photoshop to get renders for the final design.
In addition to the 3D elements utilized in this design, I had a great time creating “footsteps” for all the mechanical bugs. To create those elements, I painted the bugs’ actual feet and had them “run” across sheets of paper so I could reference their actual footsteps in the design. Below, you can see several sketches for this design along with the footprints that inspired the final design.
Some other things I had to take into consideration were shelving and noting measurements of the final box for displays. Below are mock-ups created in-house to get these measurements.
Another part of this role was working alongside the marketing team to create graphics for social media on a daily basis. However, my favorite project was creating unique stickers for influencer packages. The company was marketing its new line of toys, Junkbots, and sending early releases of the toys to influencers. The stickers included in the influencer packages went hand-in-hand with the Junkbots packaging and product identity. I had a blast expanding upon this toy line’s branding with these character-driven sticker designs!
Above is the final set of stickers. Below, you can see all the sketches I created for this project. I aimed to create playful, graffiti-inspired graphics of the characters from the Junkbots series.
