How do you handle borrow the process, not the palette?

Copy a reference closely and you have made a derivative. Copy it loosely and you have learned nothing. Kept the production idea intact, blind emboss under foil, a cut-through monogram, a tone-on-tone gloss pattern, and shifted every colourway hard: pastel tins became earthy Pantone floods, Klein blue became oxblood, green became terracotta with silver.

How do you handle let the type be the variable?

A single house typeface across a set collapses it into a series. Assigned each build a face from a specimen library: deli serifs, art-deco inlines, liquid chrome, blackletter, sign-painting brush, 70s bubble. The type sets the era; the finish stays ours.

How do you handle four pieces from type alone?

Most packaging leans on a mark or an image. Four builds are pure typography: a riso sticker sheet, mint deco cartons, a blackletter mailer, heart-die-cut tags. No logo, no illustration, nothing but letterforms and a finish.

Design exercise · Boxes · Peppermint

Seventeen references, forty-four answers.

A reference exercise. Seventeen packaging and stationery pieces we admire, each rebuilt two or three times with a shifted palette, a different substrate and a typeface from a specimen library, so the production idea carries over and the design does not.

Boxes for Print Peppermint design exercise with , emboss, deboss, spot uv, painted edges, die cut foil stamping, 17 reference pieces, 44 builds, every colourway shifted from its source and type drawn from 34 display specimens.

FoilsYellow Gold · 101, Deep Copper · 115-2, Rose Gold · 117-3, Silver · 120, Rainbow Iridescent · R1 TechniquesDeboss, Die Cut, Painted Edge, Emboss, Hot Foil, Copper Foil, Gold Foil, Holographic Foil, Rose Gold Foil, Silver Foil, Letterpress, Raised Spot UV, Spot UV StocksHyacinth Cotton · 32pt, Kraft natural 18pt, Suede laminate, Soft-touch laminated 32pt

The idea

Seventeen pieces we admired, mostly packaging, a few cards. The exercise was not to reproduce them. It was to isolate the production idea inside each one and rebuild that idea somewhere it had not been used.

Three rules

01Borrow the process, not the palette. Kept the production idea intact, blind emboss under foil, a cut-through monogram, a tone-on-tone gloss pattern, and shifted every colourway…
02Let the type be the variable. Assigned each build a face from a specimen library: deli serifs, art-deco inlines, liquid chrome, blackletter, sign-painting brush, 70s bub…
03Four pieces from type alone. Four builds are pure typography: a riso sticker sheet, mint deco cartons, a blackletter mailer, heart-die-cut tags. No logo, no illustratio…

How this worked

Every colourway moved far enough that none of these reads as a copy. The type came from a specimen library rather than a house font, so the set does not collapse into one voice.