Candy Caddy Project/Teacher Externship

 After our tiny packaging project (see below) our Graphic Design students moved on to a more hefty project making candy caddies that reflected the personality and traits they show the world (on the outside of the box) and the traits they tend to hold closer to their hearts (the candy pouches on the inside of the box.) A thank you to Jelly Belly for sharing their official die line for a candy caddy they actually use on the shelf, and another thank you to one of Jelly Belly's printers, PM Packaging who donated the specially die cut boxed to our school and to Vintage High's Graphic Design Class.  

Here at New Tech, thanks to a donation of piles of old Graphic Design Magazines, my students were able to cut and paste images from the bunch.  It was a great way to expose students to great design, right at the beginning of the school year, without the kids even knowing that this was what they were doing as they leafed through the magazines, looking for images to use! 

We talked about use of color, design, and use of space. We also spent considerable time learning how to give and get effective feedback and reviewed how designers develop new packaging out in the real world. The final boxes were put on display during open house night and we hope to find a more public place to display the work in the near future.  

This project is a great example of how awesome it is to work with community partners like Jelly Belly and PM Packaging who spent considerable time this summer showing me and another Graphic Design teacher at Vintage how "the sausage is made." We had a chance to tour the printing plant, see all the presses, talk with everyone on the PM Packaging team. 

We spent the rest of the week meeting with the entire Creative Team at Jelly Belly from junior designers all the way up to the VP of Marketing. We learned about every aspect of package design, from the office to the manufacturing floor of Jelly Belly to see the designs in action.  We took home many, many samples of packaging to show the students so that they could analyze what makes good packaging design. 

I came into the school year feeling confident that I could teach beginning packaging design and that my lesson was rooted in real world application.  I loved sharing all my photos and experiences from the summer so that the students understood that what we were creating with our candy caddy project is exactly what designers do in industry when they are developing new packaging to bring product to the marketplace!​