Dāt creates travel themed bite-sized cakes sweetened with one of the world’s oldest traveling fruits, dates.

DISCIPLINES

Brand Identity
Marketing
Packaging
Illustration

GRAPHICS TEAM

Samantha Heintz
Aviv Kesar
Halina Herc

TIMELINE

Winter 2026
10 weeks

PACKAGING TEAM

Tyler Innes
Marissa Johnston
Eddie Chow
Izack Padilla

PROJECT BRIEF

Paper packaging is sustainable and recyclable. To increase its use, this year's Paperboard Packaging Alliance Design Challenge asks students to design an influencer PR box for an original luxury confectionery brand that holds the retail product inside.

CONCEPT

After identifying a gap in the market, our team developed chocolate-covered date cakes, transforming one of the world's oldest fruits into a naturally sweet, on-the-go treat. Inspired by travel, we created an immersive brand experience featuring postcards, a passport, and a luxury travel bag-inspired PR package. Centered around the slogan “Save the Date,” the campaign blends themes of travel and connection, encouraging influencers to share the experience together.

Process

IDEATION
Collage of various packaging, gift boxes, shopping bags, and promotional materials, including a leather handbag, a person opening a box of cupcakes, coffee packaging, a calendar, and assorted gift and product boxes.

Gathered moodboard inspiration for structural aspects, illustrations, and other concepts that we wanted to include in both the PR package and the retail package.

STAMPS

Brand Design System

TYPE
FINAL BRANDING

We made the final logo more smooth and fluid to better match the product’s richness. Lowercase letterforms bring a warmth to the mark, while the ligatures give a nod to the elegant typefaces that shaped our early design direction. After some tweaking of the active color palette to ensure that the different flavor colors matched in saturation, we landed on the Dat color palette.

A color palette featuring five shades: Bittersweet Cacao, Toasted Almond, Sunlit Lemon Curd, Pistachio Grove, and Coconut Mist, with the word 'dat' in large font below.

Illustrations

Four travel stamps for France, Dubai, Bali, and Italy, each with distinctive shapes and colors.

Location stamps drawn from the bold aesthetic of passport stamps, evoking discovery and destination. Ingredient illustrations had that same stamp-like quality.

Colorful hand-drawn illustrations of coffee beans, herbs, and citrus fruits on a black background.
Diagram showing the process of designing an envelope, from shape exploration and refinement to final design, including steps like shape refinement, shape exploration, mechanism exploration, interior revamp, and final design.

Prototypes

Color-coded packaging designs for four different chocolate date cake flavors: blue, green, orange, and yellow, with illustrations of ingredients on each package.

Retail Package Final Dielines

Retail Product Photography

Stack of four colorful boxes of dark chocolate date cakes, arranged in a pyramid, with each box in green, blue, orange, and yellow, on a plain white background.
Black and orange box of almond chocolate date cakes placed on a white surface, with a white note card beneath it that reads "Save the Date" and mentions Provence, France.

For next time…

TAKEAWAYS

This project has been one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences during my time at Cal Poly. Collaborating with Industrial Technology and Packaging majors offered valuable insights and allowed me to learn from their expertise. This project required adaptability and responsiveness, as dielines were continuously updated based on feedback from our biweekly professor meetings. This experience showed me how to navigate evolving design constraints while maintaining a cohesive creative solution.

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE
summit society
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