What makes good product or packaging design?

The Coca-Cola bottle has been re-designed endlessly but the more it changes, the more it stays the same as its design works. So what makes good product or packaging design, asks Jonathan de Burca Butler

It seems to have been around for ever, and yet the Coca-Cola bottle never fails to look modern and fresh. The original was designed by The Root Glass Company of Indiana who received the simple brief to create a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize it if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground”. One hundred years after its creation in 1916, it remains unmistakable.

“The Coca Cola bottle was designed mainly to be distinctive,” says Dr. Ann Wilson, a lecturer in Visual Culture and Design History in the Media at the Cork Institute of Technology.