As we've said, the way that packaging looks is very important. Most packaging is made up of a logo, drawings or photos, colours and information such as the ingredients or price. All of these things together go to make up the design of the packaging.

The design of packaging is very clever as it can tell us a lot about the product inside. How does this work?

Well, the obvious way that packaging tells us about what's inside it is with photos or drawings. Washing powder boxes often have pictures of clean, bright clothes hanging on a clothes line. This tells us that the powder inside will get your clothes clean and fresh when you wash them.

Some food packaging uses photographs very cleverly. If you look at a tin of tomatoes it is unlikely to simply have a picture of the contents of the tin. It probably has a photo of a meal that is made using tomatoes - Spaghetti Bolognese maybe. This is more likely to make you buy them, as it gives you an idea of what you could use them for (and makes you hungry!).

The colours used on packaging also tell us a lot about what's inside. Behind the pictures of lovely clean clothes on washing powder boxes, the colours are very bright. This tells us that the powder inside will keep our clothes looking bright and new. Black or brown wouldn't work as well because when we see these colours they can make us think of dirt.

Sometimes the colour of packaging is the same as what's inside. Tomato sauce comes in red bottles, brown sauce comes in brown bottles. Sometimes this isn't very sensible. Cola drinks are dull brown in colour. Because this would make cans and bottles look dull, they normally use brighter colours. We soon get to know the colours that are used, and expect cola drinks to be in red packaging.

Some packaging is see-through. This lets us see what's inside so that we know exactly what we're buying. You wouldn't want to buy a sandwich if you couldn't see how much filling was in it, would you?

The logo is usually the most important part of the packaging, but quite often doesn't really describe what's inside the packaging. Logos are there to help us recognise and find things that we've bought before and want to buy again. Your favourite chocolate bar, drink, trainers or pop group will all have their own logo. When you go into a shop to buy one of these things, you can spot the logo easily and find exactly what you want.

Finally, packaging also has lots of information about what's inside - the ingredients, the weight, the price and much more. This information is usually on the back of the packaging, but you should try to read it before you buy things. Food packaging has some very interesting information on the back - read it to find out how much fat, sugar, protein and vitamins you are about to eat!

So you can see that the packaging is actually quite complicated. It is very carefully designed to tell us about the products inside, and to encourage us to buy them.

There are two other important bits of information on the back of packaging. To find out more, read the recycling section.