Upjohn Company Trade Dress

Upjohn Company Trade Dress

The Upjohn Company’s Tradedress Packaging System, Standards Manual, Color Tolerance Cards, and Four Designs Variations

Don Adleta

1990

Professional Designs for The Upjohn Company; a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm founded in 1886 by William E. Upjohn.  This trade dress design for The Upjohn Company’s worldwide market established a standards manual for more than 2,500 various shapes and configurations with color-coding for patient efficacy.

In 1988 Don started to art-direct the entire tradedress of pharmaceutical packages of The Upjohn Company.  His lifetime career quest of doing graphic design for the good of mankind is on full display. The legibility is absolutely clear on the packaging and could save lives in critical situations.

There were 115 jobs on Adleta’s plate at any given time during his tenure at The Upjohn Company and the tradedress project was just one job on his list of projects. What that meant was he had a complex problem to solve in as simple a form as possible. This included not only the packaging system as shown here but it also included the focus testing of four unique design concepts. It involved the 30 subsidiaries around the world. Upjohn printed their packaging in seven different languages. This standards manual binder is so comprehensive that the computer programmers used it to program the computer generated packaging after the initial design launch. It took the package specs, interfaced them with the FDA approved labeling copy, interpolated that with the design specifications and then manufacturing would print the correct package for the production line and distribution.

Chris Farrier designed the packaging system that was selected for worldwide distribution. He also designed and created the files for the standards manual. Hamish Thompson from New Zealand did one of the other designs tested.