By: Ulyana Kozhevnikova

The practical side of design has always been a hot topic, but emotional one is rarely brought up. How does a consumer percept the color of a label, the graphics style, or the idea behind a logo? How do our choices affect whether a customer will like the packaging or not, whether they’ll give the product a chance? Human subconscious that stores answers to these questions is like a metaphoric black box—we put inside visual and verbal information about a brand without any real understanding of how it is going to be processed.

Meanwhile turning an unknown product into a dearly beloved brand is a cognitive process where main factors are attention, perception, comprehension, and memorizing. Let’s see how they work at every step of interaction between a consumer and a product and what tools are the most efficient to control the mysterious black box of consumers’ subconscious.