Shelf Lip

A funny little quirk of designing labels and packaging for a regular old store is the fear of the elusive shelf lip. Anything you put on the bottom of the front of pack could, hypothetically, at any time, be covered up by a little rail. There is no standardized size of shelf lip, so when we’re designing, we leave a huuuuge margin of error. This pushes all the important information to the top third of pack. Product count, logos, abv, all that stuff.

This quickly becomes a short-hand design tendency: everything goes to the top of pack. This isn’t SO bad, we read from top to bottom, so it kind of makes sense. Even so, it’s limiting.

The reason this is quirky, though, is clients and designers both have this obstacle we design around, and yet its very rare. I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw a shelf lip. Next time you’re in a liquor store (or any store for that matter), keep your eye out for shelf lips. Please comment on this post next time you see one; it’d be really helpful for me to know where they are.

I don’t think this is an unreasonable way to approach a design problem, but it makes me ask:

Does design always need to consider the worst-case-scenario? Is that flexibility at the cost of specificity? What limitations are you putting on yourself because of a small possibility?