Platinum Packaging Design · 2023
Liang Bai Kai Drinking Water
by Tiger Pan
- A' Design Award 2023 Platinum Winner in Packaging Design
- Awarded April 15, 2023
- CLIENT: Jinmailang Beverage Co., Ltd
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 410,175
- Verification code B2CDE555E5 · Verify this award
About Liang Bai Kai Drinking Water
Liang Bai Kai is a glass bottle designed for cooled boiled drinking water. The name refers to boiled water that has cooled, a drink long common in China. The bottle carries no label. Instead, artwork from the Song dynasty painting Riverside Scene from Tsingming is repainted and applied to the glass by heat transfer printing. The image is divided across twelve bottles, representing the twelve traditional hours. The glass surface adds gloss and texture. Each bottle measures 313 millimeters in height and 76.5 millimeters in diameter.
TIGER PAN's Liang Bai Kai Drinking Water emerges as an exceptional exemplar of contemporary packaging design that elevates the everyday act of hydration into an encounter with cultural memory and visual storytelling, demonstrating how commercial objects may serve simultaneously as functional vessels and carriers of collective narrative. The work participates in a distinguished lineage of East Asian artistic traditions wherein panoramic depictions of communal life, seasonal festivals, and architectural environments have long served as repositories of cultural identity, here translated with remarkable precision onto the cylindrical canvas of a transparent beverage container. The technical achievement proves considerable, the white linear illustration maintaining extraordinary clarity and density while wrapping seamlessly around the curved surface, inviting viewers to rotate the bottle and discover the full panoramic narrative contained within its decorative program. Compositionally, the presentation demonstrates sophisticated understanding of product photography conventions, the bottle emerging from concentric water ripples that suggest both the moment of placement and the elemental essence of the product itself, while the graduated dark background creates theatrical isolation that focuses attention entirely upon the vessel and its elaborate surface treatment. The illustrative program appears to depict a scene of communal festivity featuring traditional architectural elements, bridges, and numerous figures engaged in celebration, this iconographic content connecting the contemporary consumer to enduring traditions of seasonal observance and collective joy. What distinguishes this packaging design is its refusal to privilege purely commercial messaging over cultural communication, instead proposing that brand identity and heritage transmission may coexist harmoniously within a single visual system. The chromatic austerity of the presentation, restricting the palette essentially to black, white, and silver, amplifies the preciousness of the illustrated content while positioning the product within premium market expectations. Viewers are invited to consider how contemporary design practices might serve not merely commercial imperatives but broader cultural functions of preservation, transmission, and celebration of shared visual heritage.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The main function of the bottle is to contain cool-down boiled water, meaning Liang Bai Kai. What comes next is the label-less bottle contains and shares with the consumers a very important part of ancient Chinese art. Chinese is the only ethnic who drink hot water when it is cool down in their daily life. And the habit can be traced back in 7BC.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- height 313mm x diameter 76.5mm
- Tags
- water, Chinese water, bottle, package, label-less
- Production Technology
- The glass material will differentiate the wine from its competitive brands, who are normally packed in plastic. Bottled in glass, the gloss and texture is upgraded on the surface.
- Design Challenge
- Regarding the artwork, the original version is vague so we rearrange the layout and paint it all again, which is separated by the 12 bottles, representing 12 earthly branches hours. As for the technique to realize the drawings, 4 different kinds of crafts are tried out and we succeeded in heat transfer printing.
- Project Duration
- The project lasts 5 months, designed in Shenzhen.
- Operation Flow
- How to save consumer's effort to look for an ideal product is the key challenge of this case. A distinctive symbol, an explicit layout of info and a unitive serial system of package will help Wellmind to solve the problem, where consumers are able to recognize and pick up the products from far away.While it is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, it also makes it difficult for new changes. Today, the brand image of Liang Bai Kai needs to be presented to consumers in a contemporary aesthetic.
- Research
- To drink cool-down boiled water is an inherited habit from the ancient time. The new packaging design is bring the heritage to the modern life of Chinese along with a different perspective to appreciate traditional arts.
- Inspiration
- The inspiration is from the national treasury artwork of Riverside Scene from Tsingming made in Song dynasty over 1000 years ago. It is the only piece among the famous ten that illustrates the life of ordinary people' s life instead of that of the nobles. So the painting is echoing with the product of Liang Bai Kai so well that it is repainted and carved on the bottles.
- Image Credits
- Tiger Pan
Colors of Liang Bai Kai Drinking Water
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