A mood board is
not a decision.
Bhaesaj is a traditional lip balm made since 1989. Another team had set an initial visual direction, modern classic, science, spacious, drawn from the language of classic medicine labels, and that board came to me as the brief. A board of that kind carries a feeling, not an object. It does not say how thick a wall should be, how a lid should close, or what surface finish makes something read as heritage rather than pastiche. The direction also carried its own trap: classic and modern balance on a narrow line, and a direction that leans too far either way misses on both counts at once.
From words
to form.
Rather than take the first plausible reading of the board and resolve it, I worked outward first, expanding what each term could physically mean before narrowing to a direction.
Spacious can be proportion, negative space on the label, or the way a lid sits away from the body. Science can be precision in the parting lines, a clinical surface, or restraint in the graphics.
Working from the words rather than the pictures produced a range of shape, surface, and functional options that the board itself did not imply. From there I resolved the strongest of them, hand sketches to explore proportion cheaply, shape and surface boards to fix the tactile language, then 3D renders to test the forms as real volumes and judge where the classic-to-modern line actually sat.
A direction,
resolved.
The work was held at parent-company level on budget, with the decision to stay with the classic packaging. Taking an ambiguous brief and widening it before narrowing, treating the words as a space of possibilities rather than a picture to reproduce, is the move I rely on most in digital product work, where the brief is almost always a direction rather than a definition.
