packaging as content

March 23, 2012

Water Designs its own Package

Xiaoli Wen’s 2009 “Water Shaped Bottles”

Rubber molds, made from discarded Gin, beer, water, Coke & whisky bottles, were filled with plaster and allowed to cure while hanging under flowing water. Porcelain bottles were then made from the “water formed” plaster casts. (See pictures of the process on Dezeen.)

“Water does not have its own shape. It is shaped by its container. Now water wants to change the container’s shape therefore to decide its shape by itself.”

–Xiaoli Wen

A nice personification of water wanting to design its own packaging. But what about the other beverages that were originally contained in these bottles? Maybe gin, beer, Coke and whisky also want to change their containers’ shapes. I know: these other beverages all mostly contain water. (…and where on earth does one find a whisky waterfall?)

Prototypes of the porcelain bottles appear to be for sale (or have once been for sale) on Wen’s website, although the prices seem to be missing.

(One more picture, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 21, 2012

2 Anthropomorphic Heineken Bottles

Two takes on kicking back with Heineken:

1. An anthropomorphic Heineken bottle —with arms, but no legs— “kicks back” and relaxes in the retouched photo at top. I assume this image originated from some specific Heineken campaign, but I can’t find the original source. (If you see what I mean.)

2. An anthropomorphic Heineken bottle —with arms and legs— appears in a disheveled, “morning after” state in a 2007 Michael Williams painting entitled, “Cancuned.” (Detail shown above.)

(Another Williams painting with an anthro-pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 12, 2012

Paul Lee’s Untitled (Can Sculptures)

While lighting fixtures made from beer cans in Friday’s post strongly appeal to a certain male, hetero decorative impulse, a similar mash up of beverage cans and lighting also occurs in the untitled “can sculptures” of Paul Lee, but with a differing agenda.

Using everyday objects such as soda cans, light bulbs, and socks, Lee’s Untitled (Can Sculpture) series explores the relationships between materials and their coded cultural and sexual meanings.

…Each of the pieces in Untitled (Can Sculpture) begins with a soda can with a photocopy of a young man’s face pasted over the label. The image is taken from a 70s naturist magazine and was chosen because the boy’s strong classical features exemplify archetypical ideals of beauty and youth.

… Through this sensual fetishisation of everyday consumer objects Lee’s sculptures explore the nature of personal identity, their disposable nature highlighting the ephemeral transience and guilty pleasures of desire.

Artist’s Profile: Paul Lee, Saatchi Gallery

Note how, in the lower sculpture below, with the two cans connected through the eyes, Lee uses the same kind of “cylindrical completion” that we’ve noted as a package design trend: using a row of separate cans to form a larger whole. (See: Turner Duckworth Coke packaging) While the string joining two cans might, on the one hand, suggest “eye contact” between the two individuals, the matching cans are arranged in such a way that same young man’s face —a single individual— spans the two connected beverage cans.

Lee also did a more minimal series of polychome beverage can bottoms…

(More untitled (can sculptures) and a video, after the fold…) (more…)

March 7, 2012

Trix Cereal X-Ray Pack

About a year ago, we featured some package design by Mark Oliver, Inc. (above, left) that used actual-sized product photography of cereal to cover the outside of some Vita Crunch cereal boxes. Not just a photo of cereal in a bowl with milk, but a continuous, all-over pattern of cereal covering the front, tops and sides of each box. As if the boxes were transparent and we could see the contents inside. (See also: Packaging & What Lies Beneath)

“The client wanted to sell breakfast cereals priced at 99 cents each. The budget was tight and limited to process color. We made the product the hero. We laid it on scanners to record, used 3-D type to grab attention, and created distinctive, fun, colorful boxes that jump from the shelves.”

Later I saw this Trix Cereal packaging and realized that there had been an earlier precedent for this kind of X-ray package design for cereal.

Above: the introductory Trix ad from a 1956 issue of Life Magazine.

These earlier, rabbit-less Trix packages were a revelation to me… modern, in the same way that Jackson Pollack’s “allover” drip paintings were considered modern in those days…

“Allover painting refers to a canvas covered in paint from edge to edge and from corner to corner, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. This is a radically different approach from modes of painting that offer specific focal points, such as the sitter’s face in the case of a portrait. With an allover composition, our eyes are invited to wander the canvas from the top to the bottom, following lines, shapes, and colors.”

Allover Painting, Museum of Modern Art

As a kid, I was convinced that I could correctly identify colors on black & white television. Perhaps it was advertising like this that gave me this idea. Above, is a screen shot from one of the earliest black & white TV commercials for Trix. The way they labeled the colors on screen (raspberry red, orange, lemon yellow) reminds me of Jasper Johns’ allover paintings from around the same time.

Below: Jubillee and False Start from 1959. (via: Flourishing Mirth)

(More Trix-ray vision, after the fold…) (more…)

March 6, 2012

My Belated Coverage of Freshkills Sneak Peak

In early October we attended The Freshkills Park “Sneak Peak.” There were a lot of package related artworks and events at the landfill that day, that I would have written about sooner, had I not been foolishly waiting on more information from someone who never got back to me.

So now, 5 months later, on the better-later-than-never theory…

1. Lisa Dahl | Suburban Export

I bought a house! It was part of this subdivision of houses above, built by Lisa Dahl for her Suburban Export project and situated at Freshkills landfill… a whole neighborhood of recycled food cartons. Not what you’d first think of as the healthiest of locations for a neighborhood, and perhaps that’s why houses there were selling for only $10 a piece. Mine was made from a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box and included a built-in neodymium magnet at the base to keep it from blowing away.

2. Linda Byrne | Ghost Net and Cup Nests

Made from recycled plastic six-pack rings, and installed on a bridge like some ethereal, alternate-universe chain link fence. Also: bird nests made from the same stuff. (Which probably does find its way into the composition of actual bird’s nests!)

3. DB Lampman | I am Within

DB Lampman’s performance with sculpture that took place on top of one the capped mounds of the landfill. This sculpture was originally installed in late August but was temporarily removed due to Hurricane Irene. (Nice to speculate about what someone might have made of this sculpture had it become airborne and landed in their yard.) The performance above was from September.

(1 more after the fold…) (more…)

March 2, 2012

Pipe Shaped Bottle | Bottle Shaped Pipe

Sorry about the homonymic bait-and-switch. “Smoking pipes,” of course, have little to do with “plumbing pipes.” A disingenuous way, perhaps, to end “Pipe Bottle Week,” but, in my own defense, the whole series really started with Jonna Pedersen’s painting of a Skipper’s Pipes packet. (And I’ve already stipulated to personally conflating the two types of pipe!)

1. Pipe Shaped Bottle
As previously mentioned, Avon has produced figural bottles of almost any object you can name. Over the years they’ve produced quite a few smoking pipe shaped bottles for men’s products. I like that this particular bottle is in the shape of a corncob pipe since that adds yet another layer of figuration to the Treachery of Images: “This is not a corncob pipe.”

2. Bottle Shaped Pipe
This vintage pipe (from Dawnmist Studio Clay Pipe Shop) dissembles in a different way…

This is a pipe that begins looking like a champagne bottle but when unscrewed the lower portion accepts a stem and mouth piece to become a pipe! There are neat metal fittings for the thread and a metal-push fit stem with the mouth piece itself being made of yellow plastic (which is loose). Some of the varnish on the wood of the stem has worn off but otherwise the item is in good condition and was never actually smoked although I think it could have been. Perhaps it was originally made as a gentleman’s celebration gift? The pipe displays well and makes a rather unusual vintage talking piece. The image shows the pipe when assembled and as a complete bottle. Height when assembled 5 inches. (Sold)

Aside from these vintage artifacts, are there any more recent examples?

(Asked and answered, after the fold…) (more…)

February 28, 2012

A New Contributor…

In other news, I’m pleased to announce that Bliss Buter-Thompson, Senior Designer at BurgoPak USA, has consented to contribute to box vox.

BurgoPak is a fascinating company, whose patented Slider Pack we were just talking about earlier this month.

I’ve no doubt that there’s much more to learn about BurgoPak’s structural packaging innovations. Bliss, having been with the firm since they first opened their branch in Chicago, brings firsthand structural engineering experience to her commentary on package design.

For her first post, she’s made a survey of student sculptural/packaging projects with emotional content: “Packaging an Emotion.”

–Randy Ludacer

February 8, 2012

Rachel Perry Welty’s Miniature Packaging

Rachel Perry Welty’s artwork has sometimes involved the making of miniature folding cartons. Her commissioned work for Johnson & Johnson’s New York lobby (“Product” 2007) for example, features hundreds of miniature versions of their retail boxes, past and present.

Executives from Johnson & Johnson saw a piece called, “Contents of My Pantry,” which featured miniaturized boxes of everyday items like cereal. They later commissioned Welty to create a similar installation of all their products, which now continues to grow larger and larger on a wall at the corporate headquarters.

“I started with the antique products like bunion plasters and keep adding to it as the company adds new products,” Welty said.

Brooks School Website, 2008 (Visiting Artist…)

She’s also made miniature versions of other iconic packaging designs, including a tiny stack of a more contemporary Brillo box — more contemporary than the 1960’s package design of Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

She’s also made a miniaturized survey of currently available Crest Toothpaste varieties (which further illustrates a point I was making in my previous post about how far from Deskey’s original brand packaging Crest has wandered).

“Choice (Crest toothpaste),” (2005) comprises every size and variety of Crest toothpaste available at my local drugstore, re-made in 1 : 5 scale. This installation probes the questionable benefit of choice in our culture and reflects, in an everyday way, our desire to acquire, inflamed by the miniature.

Rachel Perry Welty

The impulse to make miniature replica packaging as artwork is interesting and I was curious about her idea that consumers might be “inflamed” by miniatures. Hunting around a bit, I turned up an interview from 2006 in which she also mentions this idea:

“I take the actual containers, after we consume the contents, and I open up the boxes, photocopy and reduce them. I’m thinking a lot about this miniature inflaming the desire to acquire. They’re made into something cute and precious or something that you want to buy.”

There’s also a contrasting scale at work when she presents a huge accumulation of tiny packages, as in the Johnson & Johnson “Product” installation and the 2007 “Brillo” …methodically organized, but compulsive — like a dollhouse for hoarders.

(A few more photos, after the fold…) (more…)

February 6, 2012

Colbert’s SuperPack Pack

If I had just waited a few more weeks, I could have made Stephen Colbert’s SuperPack pack the centerpiece of last month’s post about Super PAC packaging.

Colbert recently announced (facetiously?) that Ben & Jerry’s was coming out with a limited edition “SuperPack Pack” of his “Americone Dream” flavor. Whether or not this is true, it pleases me to see the packaging implications of “Super PAC” come to the fore.

Americone Dream’s package design has already undergone a few iterations. An earlier version had a red & white striped flag background, rather than the Ben & Jerry’s new blue skies. The new “SuperPack” pack also appears to now have red, white & blue banners, festooned under the lid.

To my way of thinking, Colbert’s Super PAC (“Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow”) is a brilliant piece of popular conceptual art. By legally forming a bona fide “Political Action Committee” with comedic rather than (strictly) political intentions, Colbert uses a similar stratagem to that of the “N.E. Thing Company”—artists who officially formed a corporation in 1966, hiring a corporate graphic designer to design their corporate logo, etc. and yet who had entirely non-corporate motivations for doing so.

Like N.E. Thing Co., Colbert used an existing legal entity (a Super PAC, in his case) as an opportunity to subvert and critique an institution while feigning participation. N.E. Thing attended trade shows and sent out corporate faxes. (The fax/facsimile was the latest thing in corporate communications in 1966, just as the Super PAC/Political Action Committee is the latest thing in political fund-raising in 2012.) Colbert ran faux political ads on television and tried (belatedly) to get on the ballot on the South Carolina Republican primary.

(A video of Colbert’s SuperPack pack announcement follows, after the fold…) (more…)

February 3, 2012

Capsule Packaging

Following the pharmaceutical thread, the earliest patent for a two-piece, telescoping capsule was granted in 1846 to Jules César Lehuby.

Hard two-piece capsules were first invented in 1846 when Parisian pharmacist J.C. Lehuby was granted French Patent 4435 for “Mes envelopes médicamenteuses”

Division of Biopharmaceutics and Pharmacokinetics
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki

I failed to turn up Lehuby’s patent, but above are patent drawing of various envisioned improvements and refinements by other inventors over the years.

I’m less interested here in ways of packaging capsules, than in the idea that the capsule, itself, is a package. A capsule’s main purpose is to shield us from the bad-tasting medicine it contains. Lehuby compared his invention to a “cylindrical box capable of containing the required medical substance in its interior.”

What is a capsule, if not a tiny, edible container? If you have any lingering doubt that it’s truly a “package” in the modern sense of the word, just consider the extent to which the capsule is branded. (e.g.: Nexium “the purple pill)

Capsule manufacturer, Capsugel even has a “Build You Own Capsule” app, enabling its customers to brand their capsules with Pantone color and logos.

What is that, I ask you, if not “package design?”

The capsule, in fact, is such an intriguing contraption that designers have sought to package other products in them, as well. Usually this is done by carefully implying “vitamins” rather than prescription drugs.

Vitamin Water capsule bottle concept by Cindy Ng & JJ Lee

There is, however, the occasional encapsulated product that will embrace the drug thing, as in the Sunshine Enema music package, in which the music is contained in a capsule-shaped USB drive. (Designed by Jeremy & Erin Fortes)

(More encapsulated products, after the fold…) (more…)

January 25, 2012

Ceci n’est pas une Skippers pipe

Jonna Pedersen (whose sculptures we looked at yesterday) entitled the painting above “This Is a Pipe.” Making clever use of a brand of licorice pipes that I was not aware of —“Skippers Pipes”—and making reference to that popular paradox of representational art: The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. In Magritte’s painting a pipe appears above a caption that declares in French, “This is not a pipe”…

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!

In Pedersen’s painting, Magritte’s paradox is given an additional twist, since the product portrayed is, itself, a faux pipe. [Full disclosure: when I was in art school, I combined a 6 inch lenngth of galvanized heating pipe with an elbow joint (forming a pipe-like shape) and gave it the old “Ceci n’est pas une pipe inscription.]

Originally trademarked in 1966 by Chicago based Leaf Brands, Inc., the product has recently come under fire as a simulated tobacco candy product.(like candy cigarettes) and appears to be somewhat discontinued. That is to say, I can find no mention of it on Leaf’s web site.

Matching Skippers Pipes wrapper photo from mulch.thief’s Flickr Photostream

Upper left: photo from Christiane Torden; on right: counter top display box from Fine Little Day; lower photo from After The Denim

Note how the lower box has additional faux features. This is not a wooden gift box tied up with red string.

(My own non-pipe work, after the fold…)

(more…)

January 23, 2012

Jonna Pedersen’s Package Sculptures

Last August we featured some of Jonna Pedersen’s paintings of Danish packaging.

Her contribution to the upcoming, Global Village 2012 show in Alkmaar, Holland, includes two over-sized package sculptures: a Maggi Bouillon box (above) and the margarine package on right.

–Randy Ludacer

December 29, 2011

Camouflage Pattern Beverage Branding

On left: Camouflage pattern Miller beer can (from: The Sparkler); on right: Busch beer’s autumnal camouflage (from: 2CoolFishing message board)

Originally developed as a functional pattern (as opposed to a decorative pattern) camouflage might seem an odd choice for product packaging since the pattern is meant to conceal.

Usually product packages are designed to attract attention so it’s striking when a package is designed to disappear into the background. Of course, the environment of store shelves is quite different from outdoor environments. So what blends into the background in the desert sands might actually be quite conspicuous at the grocery store. And vice versa.

Probably the point of using camo in this context has more to do with masculine connotations of hunting and military service than in concealment.

Miller Brewing had this to says about it’s limited edition camouflage packaging:

“Miller High Life is again honoring its century-old connection with the outdoors by introducing limited-edition, camouflaged packaging and cans of Miller High Life and Miller High Life Light.”

Photo, above right, from Wishful Slacker

2009 Vault Citrus camouflage can from ebid; photo on right from Eating in Translation

It should also be noted that there are products available for camouflaging beer cans…

(One more thing about camouflage beverage branding…)

(more…)

December 20, 2011

Clown Jars

Clown time continues with some clown-related jars from Etsy: a handmade clown cookie jar (yours, for $64.00) and “12 Vintage Clown Cupcake Toppers in Vintage Jar” (sold).

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 16, 2011

Clown Cereal

Clown cereal boxes (Kellogg’s, General Mills & Post) were, I think, all from Dan Goodsell’s Flickr Photostream

My early childhood was spent in Sarasota, Florida, home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

While clowns have been culturally waning for some time now, in those days, there was a show called “Circus Boy” on television (starring a young Micky Dolenz who grew up to become the Monkee‘s drummer) and there were lots of circus-themed packages at the grocery store. Not yet scary, clowns were still considered a good way to market children’s cereals.

Why the sudden interest in clowns, you ask?

(Asked and answered, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 15, 2011

Dan Witz: Bar Shrine Paintings

“Shrine” (I’ve also seen this painting titled as “Bar”) 2006, 68×40 oil and mixed media on canvas

Dan Witz (mentioned in yesterday’s post) was one of several roommates that I shared a low-ceilinged, South Street Seaport loft with in the late 1970s.

I like his paintings of liquor bottles. The one above from 2006 seems to have two different titles: “Bar” and “Shrine.” His later liquor bottle paintings from 2010 seem to have combined these two titles into “Bar Shrine.”

I can find nothing online to suggest that it’s intentional, but the painting above looks like a skull to me. A subliminal vanitas symbol for a splendid array of liquor choices? (Death-as-bartender: “Name your poison!”)

Bar Shrine #2 Triptych, 2010, 56" x 84" oil and digital media on canvas

(One more “Bar Shrine” painting, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 14, 2011

Ron English: Popaganda Shopdropping

Ron English is the artist who created the zipper/banana album cover mash-up that we wrote about last January.

More recently he’s been doing some cereal box package design (i.e.: art) which he’s been shopdropping into supermarkets. These “popaganda” food repacks are subversive in the same dumb sort of way that Wacky Packages were: creating momentary consumer confusion and adding a satiric, negative spin to trademarked food brands.

Some commentators have taken the cereal series as nutritional agitprop in opposition of childhood obesity. I’m not sure that English’s agenda is so politically correct, but I could be wrong.

The fun part of shopdropping, however, is when consumers puzzle over the aberrant branding messages and, in some cases, blithely purchase them.

Part of the reason I prefer not think that English’s messaging is sincerely literal is the “Sugar Diabetic Bear” below, which in my (diabetic) view is amusing, but not entirly accurate. Yes, Type 2 diabetes can be brought on by obesity, but what about Type 1 diabetes? Eating sugar certainly didn’t cause my diabetes. (See: Diabetes Myths)

(One more thing about Ron English and diabetes, after the fold…)

(more…)

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