Gu Dongjie designs delicious food packaging for cakes, mochi balls and crisp breads

Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure of poring over a huge array of top-tier packaging from countless designers. From the simple to the more expressive to the downright weird and experimental, packaging design has been honed to a fine art. And it’s especially pleasing when it’s boxed up with some tasty treats inside.

Gu Dongjie is a Beijing-based designer at Holiland, and through his work, he designs a host of different projects spanning packaging, typography and branding. His portfolio presents the perfect balance between play and sophistication, but his most recent packaging design series for Holiland is one of his best yet. Holiland is known for stocking a mix of sweet cakes, breads and bakery items – the branding of which is replete with pastel tones, cute flowers and joyful characters. Oh, and the edible items are equally lovely.

Launching in time with the Year of the Tiger 2022, the company released a collection of tiger-themed products. Dongjie was thus asked to design the packaging for Run Tiger Run, a delicious treat that celebrates the new year. “Run Tiger Run has three flavours,” explains Dongjie. “And for that, three colours were selected to symbolise the sunrise, noon and sunset respectively.”

To match the charming allure of the products that Holiland sells, the design needed to be whimsical and colourful. Doing just that, Dongjie matched three aptly suited colours for each of its three packaging designs: that’s one package design for each flavour, each representing the sunrise, noon and sunset. This is achieved through a deep orange, splashy yellow and dusky beige; meanwhile an illustrated tiger tail swishes its way across the layout. “The three colours go well with the three flavours,” says Dongjie. “I think it’s a cool thing to present the flavours of the product in this way, which will surely bring unexpectedness and surprise to the customers.”

Dongjie has also designed a handful of other pieces for Holiland, such as the boxes for some delicious-looking stuffed mochi balls. For this project, the designer has crafted a simplistic grid that sees bold, legible type run along the edge of the packet – it’s orderly and well kept, leaving the centre free for the illustrated mochi balls to shine. There’s also a blush pink box that houses a rose green bean cake – with floral illustrations included – plus a colour-blocked design for a rose egg-yolk crisp. Whatever the contents, everything is consistently colourful and appetising.

As a whole, Dongjie’s ethos as a designer is to “always find the interesting side of things within people’s perspective”, he says. Running true to this philosophy, the work we’re seeing today is exemplary of that: we can’t wait to see where he takes his designs next. “I think good design is not about reinventing things, but about finding things that people take for granted and tend to ignore,” he says. “It always becomes more interesting once you hold a new view and try a different approach. I personally prefer open projects that leave space to new ideas and thinking.”