A Minimalist Approach To Product Packaging Of 20 Famous Brands
The best packaging design is often invisible. It works so quietly — through color, form, and restraint — that you absorb the brand before you’ve consciously read a word. Which raises a fair question: how much of what’s on the shelf is actually necessary?
Strip away enough, and you find out what a brand is really made of. Turkish designer Mehmet Gozetlik decided to find out by taking 20 iconic global brands and reducing their packaging down to bare essentials, producing not one but two simplified alternatives alongside the original — a simple version, and an even simpler one.
What makes this experiment worth studying is how ruthlessly it exposes the difference between identity and noise. Most of them do look better with the minimalist approach — but not all. Some brands lose something essential when stripped back: the warmth, the personality, the very thing that made them shelf-worthy in the first place.
Minimalist product packaging has been a dominant conversation in design for years, and for good reason. Brands like Apple, Aesop, and Muji have proven that negative space can be a form of confidence — a signal that you don’t need to shout. But there’s a difference between purposeful restraint and simply removing things. This project lives in that gap.
The real insight here isn’t which version looks cleaner — it’s what each brand actually consists of once you take away the visual clutter. Sometimes it’s a color. Sometimes it’s a shape. And sometimes, as a few of these reveal, it’s nothing at all.
Check them out below and tell us which one would you pick?
Nutella
Schweppes
Mr. Muscle
Toffifee
Durex
Nesquik
Lindt
Nestle Corn Flakes
Red Bull
Pringles
A fourth variation – Even more minimalist
Tabasco
Polo
Guinness
Evian
M&M
Jelly Belly
Duracell
Smint
Vanish Oxi Action
Lemsip Max
Hmm…not too sure about the fourth variations, most of them look good till the third. What do you think? Share this post with a minimalist designer and voice your views in the comments below. All images and designs by Mehmet Gozetlik.
