Box Vox

packaging as content

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January 6, 2011

2 American Flag Mosaics from Today’s NY Times

AmericanFlags Top photo: Donna Alberico for The New York Times; lower photo: Jamie Schwaberow for The New York Times

In today’s NY Times, two different articles featured mosaic displays of the American flag.

1. The new Converse flagship store in SoHo’s has a large, package-as-pixel shoebox* display:

Just inside the front door is a huge American flag made of red, white and blue Chuck Taylors: it is not an art installation about unchecked consumerism, except that it is.

Chuck and Doc Step Out, Jon Caramanica
NY Times, January 5, 2011

*Note: Just got back from the Converse store and found out that I had misinterpreted this photo: it’s actually sneakers attached to the wall, rather than printed shoeboxes, like I thought. (So, not “package-as-pixel” but “product-as-pixel”) 1/07/01

2. In article about Thatcher Wine (“a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative ‘book solutions’ ”) there was one photo of an American flag made out of stacked books. Most of this article, however, is about about Wine’s repackaging of books:

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

Selling a Book by Its Cover, Penelope Green
The New York Times, January 5, 2011

Just as consumer packaged goods can be packaged to serve as part of a larger whole in a store display, so too, books can be packaged to serve as part of a larger, visually unified library.

Is this just a shallow, superficial trend letting “looks” trump content? Or is it indicative of some last gasp, publishing end game? (as with music CDs that are elaborately packaged with T-shirts and other value-added extras in an effort to make them seem more desirable than an illegal download)

(More about books-as-objects, after the fold…)

More from Penelope Green’s article:

Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them…

As it happens, the-book-as-relic was forecasted by marketers. Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting for JWT New York, the marketing and advertising agency, noted in her trend report for the coming year that “objectifying objects,” she said, “would be a trend to watch.”

Quoting from her report, she added: “Here’s what we said: ‘The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts — from records and books to photo albums and even cash — watch for people to fetishize the physical object. Books are being turned into decorative accessories, for example, and records into art.’ ”

See also: Books, The Idea

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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