Stamp Packaging - Colourblind Diagnosis

Having entered the RSA competition successfully (received a 'Thank you for your entry but we're sorry to say...' letter last week) and produced my stamp book ready for my Airside interview I thought that my stamp design brief could be made more substantial still. 

For this reason I've decided to design the accompanying packaging of each series of stamps. It dawned on me that during the development of each series I had designed different routes that I could use on the packaging itself. I've already done the hard work, developing the assets themselves, the logical progression then is to utilise the unused designs and incorporate them into the folded postage stamp packaging. 

The first one I attempted to design was the Colourblind Diagnosis series which uses the Ishihara test to represent the discovery.

The series is in the standard 'definitive' stamp size (everyday size) so I elected to design the packaging to the same format as the stamps you would buy from the post office.

Front:

Uses an enlarged Ishihara test found at a smaller scale on the series itself. The backgound is off-white to reflect the design of the stamps inside. Simple. The only problem I found was the placement of the barcode at this small package scale. When overlaid over the Ishihara test it becomes lost and wouldn't work as a barcode.

Reversing it out of a 85% grey box helps to make it more visible but the Ishihara design beneath still hampers it from working. 

Better to reduce the height of the barcode and place it under the other information. 

I tried removing the Ishihara from underneath the barcode but it makes the barcode look awkward along the spine, as if it were just floating in space.

Attempted to place it back in the left corner but the grey has become overbearing and far too dense.  

No longer needing to place it over the Ishihara image I decided to keep the barcode at the shorter scale and reverse the grey. This helps it to sit more harmoniously with the rest of the type on the reverse. 

For the inside I wanted to keep it simple to best show of the stamp design. This is why I chose to use black on the background - for high contrast. This simplicity has been carried across the type setting also.

The off centre fold means that when the book is closed there is a dense black line to the right of the packaging which nicely contrasts the cover and entices people to open the package.