Specialty Pharmaceuticals
Packaging that prevents the wrong dose
How a specialty pharmaceutical company designed a colour and type system that lets pharmacists tell every dosage apart at a glance.
- Industry
- Specialty Pharmaceuticals
- Service
- Packaging architecture
- Scope
- Sixty-four cartons across fourteen products
The challenge
Cartons that looked alike, holding doses that were not.
The company makes injectable treatments in several strengths. Its cartons followed a tidy brand template, which was exactly the problem: three strengths of the same medicine looked almost identical on a pharmacy shelf. Near misses were being reported, and regulators had noticed.
Any new design had to work for busy pharmacists, older patients with weaker eyesight and warehouse staff picking under artificial light, while meeting strict labelling rules in every market.
- Three dosage strengths distinguished only by small print
- Reported near misses in hospital pharmacies
- Labelling rules that differ across eleven markets
Our approach
Design for the worst moment: a tired pharmacist at the end of a long shift.
Watching the shelf
We spent time in hospital and community pharmacies, photographing shelves and timing how long it took to find a given strength. We tested early ideas under the same lights, at the same distances, with pharmacists and patients.
Colour that means strength
Each strength now has its own colour band, chosen to stay distinct for people with the most common forms of colour blindness. The band wraps around three faces of the carton, so the strength can be read whichever way it sits on the shelf.
Type that cannot be misread
We set the dosage in large, high-contrast figures with distinct shapes for easily confused numbers, and used tall lettering to highlight the differing parts of similar drug names. The system was locked into templates so every market applies it the same way.
The outcome
Faster, safer picking, and a design regulators now point to.
In controlled tests pharmacists identified the right strength in under a second, compared with nearly three seconds before. Reported selection errors fell sharply in the first year after launch. The system passed review in all eleven markets without a single change request.
My team can see the strength from across the room now. That matters at three in the morning.
The colour and type system now covers every new product the company launches, and its packaging templates are shared with contract manufacturers worldwide.