Everything you buy from a store would leave some form of waste, particularly the packaging, which we’d throw away the moment its contents are released. Since it is now more important than ever to be conscious about our environment, many brands and designers have produced eco-friendly package designs that are reusable or recyclable to help reduce our carbon footprint in nature.

From paper bags, boxes and tubes to glass jars, these designs are not only unique and creative, but also eye-catching and versatile. Available in a healthy mix of nature’s colors, these 20 eco-friendly package designs are a great source of ideas for packaging designs, that you don’t want to miss out.

Recommended Reading: 36 Clever (And Quirky) Packaging Designs

1. MUG pub by Ivan Maximov

2. SUE BEE HONEY by Ashley Gustafson

3. Branding & Packaging Design by Ady Chng

4. Plant’it Earth Identity & Packaging by Ethan Bennett

5. Rishi Tea – Loose Leaf Tea Packaging by Allie Kilmer

6. Eco-Lite Light Bulbs by Herschel Delicana

7. Package for two eggs by Buba

8. Soma Organics – SuperBite Packaging design by Dora Schall

9. Morning Ritual: Organic Strained Yogurt by Jeremy Mellon

10. Éco-traito by Jessica Ma

11. INVENT by Melissa Rosenbloom

12. Peanut & Co – Ecopackaging by Mónica López and Gloria Kelly

13. Packaging by Jacqueline Minkler

14. Yourstruly // Packaging Design by Nicole Nell

15. + ORGANIC MEADOW by Yana Stepchenko

16. Trader Joe’s Rice by Elizabeth Vornbrock

17. EcoBag. Depot WPF by Vera Zvereva, Maria Mordvintseva, and Julia Zhdanova

18. Sustainable Bagless Take-Out Packaging by JoAnn Arello

19. Happy Eggs by Maja Szczypek

20. LIGHT BULB PACKAGE REDESIGN by Mongkol Praneenit

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Jo Sabin, community manager at the graphic design website DesignCrowd.com. with thanks to Stacy Summers, DesignCrowd blog freelance editor for curating the images.

Let’s be honest, we all judge a book by its cover most of the time (and there are legions of blogs dedicated to the pastime). Books with good graphics, eye-catching font and good quality covers sell more copies than those without – simple fact. Despite what some people say, book covers are not in decline.

Book cover design is booming and even has its own awards. Design Observer promotes an annual award for book cover design with a 35-person judging panel! The traditional process of getting a book cover design can be extremely time-consuming and the result is often disappointing for the author. This is all changing with the digital age ushering in an era of author-led ebook publishing and with a little help from crowdsourcing.

New Way To Design Covers

The Internet has also enabled fast and effective circulation and exchange of documents, ideas and feedback. Now that people can ‘Pin’, ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ graphics, (in other words help advertise your book!) communities of book lovers (and design lovers) are sharing their favorite book covers across the Web.

The same activity is becoming commonplace among designers and authors, sharing book covers for feedback before they go to publishing. We’re going to take a look at how book cover designs come to be.

For easy reference, take the shortcut:

• Designing a concept
• Book cover design tips
• Book cover design tutorials
• Sources for ideas

Designing A Concept

Before you get started on creating a brief for a cover design, or before starting to design one yourself, you need to decide on the message you want to send.

Ask yourself: What is the book’s single-minded value proposition? What is the target audience of readers looking for – Inspiration and Aspiration, Success and Achievement, Knowledge and Power, Romance and Passion, Murder and Revenge?

Boiling it down to the motivation, incentive and emotion will help you generate tons of ideas or visual metaphors that determine the imagery, choice of color palette, typography, and layout that help you capture what the book is all about.

If you want to design your own book cover or if you’ve just had yours crowdsourced, here’s a list of useful tips and tricks to consider for the design, tutorials and graphic inspiration for your project. Good luck!

Book Cover Design Tips

Generate excitement. Grab attention. The main goal of every book cover is to generate excitement. The cover is one of the best tools in your marketing arsenal. That’s why you should create something that will stop people in their tracks and evoke interest. The book cover is the hook that will help you to promote your book.

(Image source: misprintedpages)

The book’s genre is important

The book cover should show what genre the book is. Look at these two book covers. It is an easy task to understand what kind of books are in front of you, right? A really good book cover “talks” to its readers through choice of typography, imagery and metaphor.

If your book is non-fiction, its cover should communicate the tone of the book. Pay attention to its scope. It is really cool when the book cover explains the scope of the book allowing the reader to manage her time.

Minimalism: Less is more!

Minimal style is timeless. It helps to focus on the book’s title and authors name.

Clown Girl, A Novel by Monica Drake, Hawthorn Press

Oil: A Concise Guide to the Most Important Product on Earth by Matthew Yeomans

An Ethics of Interrogation by Michael Skerker

Ugly Man: Stories (P.S.) by Dennis Cooper

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

How to do it wrong

It is good practice to look at bad design examples too. In fact crap, trashy book covers has become a meme in itself, whether it’s the romance genre or the aptly titled ‘funny as shit book covers’ board on Pinterest. Unfortunately there are so many bad cover designs.

Over-wrought and over-thought typography is the main offender but using stock imagery can also destroy a book’s visual credibility. Be careful with fonts and stock images.

Stop! Fighter jets? Maybe, I haven’t read this book carefully…

It’s erm… erm… I got no comments.

Book Cover Design Tutorials

Create a Realistic Book Cover in Photoshop
Look at this step-by-step Photoshop video tutorial and see how easily the book cover design process could be!

How To Create a Retro Style Superman Book Cover
Visit this Photoshop tutorial to get some basic skills in book cover design.

How to Design a Book Cover in Photoshop
YouTube is full of different Photoshop tutorials. This one of the simplest but still useful.

Designing Book Covers Tutorial (Advanced)
This is advanced level video tutorial, but why not have a try?

Create Character Driven Book Cover Art Using Illustrator and Photoshop – Part 1
Learn how to create the “Let’s Go To Monster School!” book cover.

Dirty Design: Create a Grungy Thriller Book Cover
Design a dirty grunge book cover design complete with bleeds.

Sources For Ideas

Think you’ve learned enough to create a stunning book cover design? Slow down! To get really inspired you need to immerse yourself amongst book cover design lovers. Look no further than Pinterest to find minimalist, bold, graphic-driven book cover boards that will make you swoon.

But it doesn’t stop there. Head to Flickr and the Book Cover Archive for more visual treats!

Minimalist book cover design curated by Design Quixotic

Cool Vintage Bright Book Covers by Lily Jack / Britt Mitchell

Abstract book cover design collectgion by Motion Silence / Grace Nikoari

Bold, graphic driven print covers by Peter Emmerich

Retro book cover designs of the past by Kate Siegel

Minimalist, vintage book cover designs by Web Design Org

Flickr: Bbook Covers

The Book Cover Archive

Humans are visual creatures so give careful consideration to the book’s imagery. I hope this round up has inspired you to explore and play with various graphics design elements. The cover is an important marketing tool. Do not leave the design to the last minute!

Be bold! The design should draw people in, providing just enough intrigue that they just have to buy it… now!

We have discussed LESS CSS a few times in our previous posts. If you have been following our LESS post series, you should knew that we have to compile LESS into regular CSS format that the browser could understand. There are plenty of free tools with a nice GUI to do the job such as SimpLESS, WinLESS, LESS.app, and ChrunchApp. These are all free apps.

Image courtesy: lesscss.org

However, for some reasons, you might not be willing to install yet another app, and wondering if there is an alternative way. So today we are going to show you how to compile LESS to CSS without being dependant on additional apps.

The compiling process will happen instantly on save, so yes, it is technically similar to how we compile Sass with the watch command. Let’s take a look.

Recommended Reading: LESS CSS – Beginner’s Guide

First, let’s open up the Terminal (Mac and Linux); if you are running on Windows you can open Command Prompt. Then, install LESS CSS via NPM (Node Packaged Modules) with the following command line.

 npm install less --global 

The command line will grab the LESS package and its dependencies. Note that if you are on Windows, you probably don’t need to run this command with sudo.

Then, go to Dead Simple LESS Watch Compiler. It’s a tiny Node script developed by Jony Cheung that allows us to monitor the changes in our LESS stylesheet, which then compiles them into CSS. Download the ZIP, extract it and place the less-watch-compiler.js in your working directory.

In this example, I’ve ceated two folders; /less is where I put my LESS stylesheets, and /css where I want the CSS output to be saved.

In Terminal navigate to your working directory path and run the following command:

 node less-watch-compiler.js less css 

If you felt that having to type “less-watch-compiler.js” takes too long, you could rename the file to something like watch.js so you can run the command in this way.

 node watch.js less css 

Make some changes in your LESS stylesheet and save it. If the compiling process succeeds, you will see a typical report like so.

Final Thought

By having this installed on your system, you don’t need to install an app for compiling LESS to CSS, which in turn could free up a little more space on your hard drive and streamline your workflow.

Smartphones are not only getting higher storage capacities, but are also getting more powerful. When was the last time you’ve gone two days without having to recharge your smartphone? Outside of using battery packs, finding alternative ways to charge your smartphone, or always charging your phone overnight (seriously, don’t do it), you can always bring your charging cable around.

We have previously covered Nomad’s ChargeCard but now they have an even smaller charging solution: the ChargeKey. It is so small, it fits on your keychain. Now isn’t that handy?

It’s no bigger than your average key, which is great since you can treat it like just another key. It also has a quick release for constant latching and unlatching for when you need to plug it into a USB port to charge your device.

The ChargeKey has a Micro USB version and a Apple Lightning Connector variant. The Micro USB caters for many Android devices as well as cameras or your kid’s portable gaming device. The Lightning Connector supports the latest range of iOS devices including the latest iPad, iPad Mini, iPod Touch, iPod Nano and iPhone 5S/5C.

Despite its stiff look, the ChargeKey is reportedly flexible around the middle, to accommodate charging sessions. So far it is only present in this color but we’re hoping that there will be more color variety in the future.

You can pre-order a iPhone 5S or Micro USB Chargekey today for $25. This is a first production run limited to the first 10,000 orders per cable type. Shipping date is scheduled for 30 November so get your order in to grab one for yourself.