Sight, taste and touch: how Mikael Selin built a career in packaging

Mikael Selin designs packaging as a portrait of the product inside it, capturing its heritage, quality, quirkiness or energy. He aims to make packaging people keep rather than throw away. After 11 years as an employee, starting as an intern at Buck in Los Angeles before heading to Milk and DDB, he started Mikael Selin Design Studio in Gothenburg in 2015 to work on packaging, illustration and branding from start to finish. He also takes freelance illustration work for agencies from time to time, which puts him back inside a team for part of a project. In this interview, Selin talks about designing for sight, taste and touch at once, where “visual prejudice” ends and a product’s heritage begins, and the public ‘Bucket List’ of project types he wants to take on. TBI: Hi Mikael! How’s the summer been over in Gothenburg? MS: I left my laptop on the patio, overnight, in the pouring rain. But hey, it survived!