I always find it fun to see how things are made, so today I wanted to share with you guys the process of designing our Oh Joy BAND-AID® Brand bandages! Designing these has always been a dream of mine because they are like little canvases that everyone uses and keeps in their home/car/purse, etc. Not to mention that Ruby is obsessed with them so she thinks it's pretty cool that we have Oh Joy ones now. Here's a detailed look at how we went about designing these last year…

We started with an internal review between Angie, my designer, and I looking at patterns that would work well in this tiny format. For some products, we design patterns from scratch that are exclusive to that product or season or store. For these, we were able to use patterns we had already designed but made sure to mix in some that had yet to be seen, too. We always design so much more than what actually goes through and gets produced, so we had a ton of patterns that never saw the light of day just waiting for their turn to shine. In reviewing patterns with Angie, I wanted to work with Oh Joy patterns that could work on in a very small area. We knew we might have production issues with patterns that were too intricate or had very fine lines, so we stuck with mostly bolder patterns. And since I knew this product would be in stores for at least one year, I didn't want the colors to feel specific to any one season so we colored them in a mix of very Oh Joy colors.

This is what we sent to Johnson & Johnson for a first round review. I narrowed down our internal review to a dozen or so designs. We also played with some typography options as I thought it would be fun for the bandages to say something, too! For the sake of production and what reproduces best on the BAND-AID® Brand bandages material, Johnson & Johnson cut out any designs that were too fine or had very small details. They also loved the idea of the typography, but we all felt that these type ones in particular felt a little too young (I wanted moms to feel like they could wear them, too!). So we wanted to focus on just patterns for this initial launch.

You'll also notice a registration shape on the top of every bandage which is what helps with the printing process to help line up the bandages for cutting. We were able to draw a very simple shape for this registration process and went with a circle. While we could have done something a bit more complex there, I felt like any other shape would take away from all the different patterns we had going on, and I really wanted the patterns to be the star. We also took a look at how we wanted the Oh Joy name on there—simply typed out or as an actual logo.

After a bit of back-and-forth, we narrowed it down to these patterns in two different sizes. I wanted to keep the Oh Joy name on there and felt that the logo was too distracting on this small space, so we went with the text version. We also tweaked and finalized the scale of the patterns as well as the icon on top (and little details like how the white gets added behind the registration circle and the "Oh Joy" when it's on a busier area of pattern).

And this is what they look like in real life if you haven't seen them yet! Once the designs were close to final, we were able to know what was going into the box that also needed to be designed.

For the box design, I wanted to morph a few of my favorite patterns from the strips into a new custom pattern for one side of the box. Here are the three versions we showed to Johnson & Johnson using a template for the real box that they gave us. We all agreed that Carton C felt a bit too young, and we liked B over A because it was bolder and easier to see on shelf from further away than A. 

The, for one of the sides, we needed to add a layout of the bandage strips to help show the customer what they'd get inside. Johnson & Johnson specially asked for the layout of the "strips" to feel a bit more tossed (rather then laid out in neat rows) since some of their other designer boxes had the strips in neat rows, and they wanted to differentiate the layouts of each brand. So we worked on a few "tossed" ideas. These were both feeling a bit too messy, so we played with it some more until we got to this final version which they liked and ended up being our final box…

I like to call this "The Band-Aids Are Talking to Each Other!" because they look like they are chatting and having a very important brain-storming session or telling each other their deepest and darkest secrets.

I hope that helped you get a sense of what our process what like for this recent Oh Joy product collaboration! You'll be able to get this current set of Oh Joy BAND-AID® Brand bandages in all Target stores and online for a few more months so get them while you can! (Sorry, our First Aid Kid has already sold out)

{Photos by Casey Brodley, designs by Oh Joy}