Box Vox

packaging as content

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January 25, 2011

4 Reasons We are Happy to Serve You

HappttoserveyoucupboxOn left: my photo of box: on right: photo of ceramic cup from Alison*H’s Flickr Photostream

1. Orthographic graphic design of carton for the “We Are Happy to Serve You” 10 oz. Ceramic Cup: a ceramic cup designed to look like a disposable paper cup. A product of Graham Hill’s ExceptionLab Inc. (Graham Hill also founded Treehugger.com).

2. Based on iconic “Anthora” cup designed by the late Leslie Buck for the Sherri Cup Company. From Mr. Buck’s NY Times obituary:

Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success.

Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription.

Mr. Buck’s cup was blue, with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora…

Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87
Margalit Fox, NY Times, April 29, 2010

3. Only that’s not quite correct: the ancient ceramic pictured on the “Anthora” is really not an amphora, but a cylindrical lekythos.

A lekythos (plural lekythoi) is a type of Greek pottery used for storing oil (Greek λήκυθος), especially olive oil. It has a narrow body and one handle attached to the neck of the vessel. The lekythos was used for anointing dead bodies of unmarried men and many lekythoi are found in tombs.

Wikipedia entry on lekythoi

4. One of the earliest mentions of orthographic projection was by Ptolemy, a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Ancient Greek.

Ptolemy’s work is known only in fragments, but involved the orthogonal projection of the celestial sphere on three mutually perpendicular planes

J. B. Calvert, “M. Vitruvius Pollio and the Analemma”

Which brings us back around to the lekythos (photo below, left via: eBay) and the diagram (below, right) showing a method of 3D digitization of an Ancient Greek lekythos, employing orthographic projection. (From: “3D Pottery content-based retrieval based on pose normalisation and segmentation” by Anestis Koutsoudisa, George Pavlidis, Vassiliki Liamib, Despoina Tsiafakis and Christodoulos Chamzasa.)

Lekythos-diagram

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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