Box Vox

packaging as content

August 7, 2011

Polyhedral Pineapple

Pineapple-pastry

Very appealing, pineapple-shaped package by Victor Branding Lab uses three hexagonal antiprism boxes in a polypropylene bag. (For TK Food’s pineapple pastry) Via: Lovely Package

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 5, 2011

Hair Styles & Package Design

AfroTanakaBread

09e19_261_news_thumb_ministop-afro211 When I first saw the “Black Melon Bread” snack bag (on Packaging Uqam) I liked its afro-shaped window, but I wondered (as did Karen Halliburton) whether there wasn’t something mockingly racist about it. Looking into it further, I learned that it’s actually a tie-in product to the manga character known as “Afro Tanaka” (film coming soon) and that there’s another similarly packaged “Afro Tanaka Onigiri Bomb” (on right).

The next thing I wondered about was whether there were other non sequitur “hair products” out there—products that had nothing to do with hair or hair care, but whose package design makes the product look like hair (or a hairstyle). Ogilvy & Mather’s “Rellana Hair” yarn packaging from 2009 (below, left) is a good example.

HairProducts

Lucas “Crazy Hair” candy is another example. (The illustration above, right is by Leonello Calvetti) A hat-shaped cap makes this extruding candy package vaguely anthropomorphic. With or without a hat, this really looks more like a jar growing out of a planter, than a person growing hair, but the package does extrude candy hair.

Pasta-Family-493

I was thinking that spaghetti was another likely metaphor for hair. (Or is hair the metaphor for spaghetti?) Looking for an example of that, I found Jaeyoung Ha’s “La Pasta Famiglia”—also anthropomorphic. (and with mouth-shaped die-cut windows) Here, different pasta shapes dictate the hairstyles for each of the family members. (See also: Our Family of Products)

(One more example of non-sequitur hair-style package-design, after the fold…)

(more…)

August 4, 2011

Jonna Pedersen:
Product Stories & the Inner Lives of Packaging

Jonna

As branding experts tell it, “narrative marketing” is the best way to sell something. “Tell the product’s story,” they say, “and consumers will listen.” But whatever story the brand chooses to tell, there are other, more personal stories that consumers will also hear.

Danish painter, Jonna Pedersen, explaining her recent focus on packaging, says, “To me, the outside says something about the inside. It’s all about reading the barcode.”

A product logo can unleash half-forgotten memories and sensations. We have all had this experience. Expressing the zeitgeist, consumer products can become cultural icons. Product graphics and packaging obviously matter. Visual impact and narrativity characterize those products that are deemed “classic.”

…A consumer product’s iconography is always ambiguous… A product’s packaging inherently carries a visual or textual content signaling what’s inside. There is no controlling the meanings and values that the consumer subsequently attributes to the product. That is entirely dependent on an individual’s baggage and frames of reference. In principle, the product is open to uncontrollable added meanings.

… Jonna Pedersen’s stories about consumer goods are more than representations of actual objects. They are images of our time. Familiar objects from our cultural heritage are interpreted and painted: graphic imprints and sensual experiences with numerous cultural, social and geographical references. Images of uniquely Danish products alongside images of exotic products, Greek olives or American ketchup, tell a story about an upheaval in Danish (food) culture.

Excerpts from Bente Jensen’s essay, “Product Stories”
from the book Documentary, Jonna Pedersen: Painting

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 3, 2011

The Incomplete Package Revisted

Part-Whole

This is a follow-up to an earlier article about packaging designed with photos, graphics or typography wrapping around the corners. Here’s another batch of cartons with that kind of wrap-around imagery.

Look at one of these boxes from one side and you see only part of the picture. Viewed from a corner angle, the picture is complete and cubistically 3-dimensional.

Boxes designed using this technique also open up interesting display possibilities, since they can be stacked in ways that will complete the incomplete side pictures.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 2, 2011

Pep Brands Packaging

PepBrands

“Pep” is a word not heard much lately. Once it was the root word for any number of soda brands (Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Pep Up, etc.). “Pep” has mostly fallen out of fashion. People today would more likely want energy (or buzz) rather than to be full of pep.

“Pep” sounds as corny and dated today as it did in 1973 when Felix Unger wrote his Happy & Peppy song. And yet it also has its dark side, as in “pep pills”—(1950’s Methamphetamine).

The blue box above gives “Pep” a more contemporary spin, indicating that it stands for “provides energy and performance.” The package does refrain from calling its product Pep pills—these are Pep tablets, caffeine tablets to be precise.

Among the other Pep brands featured here, we have Kellogg’s Pep—tying into the early cereal-as-health-food origins of Kellogg’s and other companies. Pep as in vim and vigor. Sodas, as we mentioned above, have long been peppy. The vintage bottle with the orange Pep logo is from Mexico. The beverage above that is contemporary: Pep Sea Buckthorn and Berry Juice Drink.

The Pep brand at the bottom is vintage fruit crate in which the logo is shown emerging from an illustrative burst as if it was so full of pep it could not be contained by its red background any longer.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 1, 2011

Karen Abel’s PBR Flowers

Karen-abel-1

Karen Abel’s “site-specific work made from discarded Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cartons found in a concrete street planter at Brock Avenue and Bloor Street West in Toronto.” (via: The MKTG Tumblr Site)

Karen-abel-2

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

 

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