packaging as content

October 19, 2010

Fallout Shelter Packaging

Today we look at packaged food in family fallout shelters.

In the 1960s, rather than promising “a chicken in every pot” president Kennedy called for “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.”

In his book, Populuxe—(in the chapter entitled “Just Push The Button”)—Thomas Hine makes an interesting point about Kennedy’s proposal for building home fallout shelters: that it would privatize civil defense.

Kennedy’s program… would have transformed civil defense from a community-based responsibility to one that was carried out by individual suburban families. Air-raid shelters were hardly a new thing, but previously they had been group facilities which mobilized the solidarity people feel when faced by common adversity. Kennedy’s program, which was welcomed by the building materials and construction industries, foresaw the fallout shelter as yet another feature of the suburban home… And the family, not the community, became the key unit of survival. This was so clear a reflection of the way in which American society perceived itself at the time that the novelty of the approach was scarcely noticed.

But the part of the fallout shelter that I wish to focus on here, is the well-stocked 1960s pantry. (Click on the photo above for post-apocalyptical product placement of a number of surviving brandname foods: Campbell’s, Lipton, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Spam, etc.)

Better Homes and Gardens… identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe

The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:

…in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. … The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

(One more well-stocked fallout shelter, after the fold…)

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October 8, 2010

Opening Bottle Credits

Back in May, box vox featured some packaging-related opening title sequences. Here are two more—each including an electric guitar soundtrack and a multitude of bottles.

The one below (via: Watch The Titles) is for “Kill Your Friends,” Kris Clarkin’s proposed film adaption of John Niven’s book of the same name:

Haven’t read the book, but I gather that the story’s protagonist is an indie music A&R man who becomes a serial killer:

Stelfox freely indulges in an unending orgy of self-gratification. But the industry is changing fast and the hits are drying up, and the only way he’s going to salvage his sagging career is by taking the idea of “cutthroat” to murderous new levels.

Harper Collins

The bottles here signify excess & moral turpitude, setting the scene for the “unending orgy of self-gratification” mentioned above—or the packaging aftermath of such. The music is by Richard Lightman, whose name appears in the credits (apporopriately enough) on an album cover.

The second opening title sequence (with another multitude of bottles), is actually the one that that I saw first: HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Here the bottles are a reference to prohibition & bootlegging in Atlantic City—(the bailiwick of this TV series)—as well as implying a certain message-in-a-bottle thing…

Initially, I was irritated by the anachronistic electric guitar music of this intro. Was there no music from the period that might have signaled “Nucky” Thompson’s inner psyche just as effectively? But now that I know it’s a song by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, I’m suddenly willing to cut them some slack because I do dig it.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 7, 2010

Choi’s Package

(Note: “package” broken into two words—“pack” & “age”)

I don’t know why it is that “registered mail” should scare me so. Why is it that the first thought that pops into my head is: “Who’s suing me?” Do I subliminally associate the post office’s pink registered mail notice with the dreaded “pink slip”? —(Which was never generally pink to begin with.)

Whatever the source of this momentary anxiety, it was with equal portions of relief and delight that I realized that the ‘pack-age’ that I was signing for at the post office was this first volume of Choi’s Package —and that Beach Packaging Design’s work is included!

We’re pleased to be in such good company—other designers, whose work we’ve long admired—some of which I’ve even written about here on box vox.

Here’s how our 3 pages look… (click photos for close-up view)

(More pages, after the fold…)

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August 5, 2010

Jack Daniel’s / Erased de Kooning

Following up on the issue of Willem DeKooning’s drinking and brand preferences —(see: Ale Cans Part 3: “The Drinking and Brand-Preference / Sexual-Preference Story”)— I now present, for your consideration: a square¹ bottle of Jack Daniel’s alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 “Erased de Kooning.”

Conceptually groundbreaking at the time, this artwork created some controversy in the art world. (negation as creation)

For his part, de Kooning showed plenty of intelligence and grace, cooperating in the way that he did, although, reportedly, he was angered when Rauschenberg actually exhibited the (former) drawing.

Thinking about it now, 60 years later, what with de Kooning’s history of alcoholic blackouts and his later Alzheimer’s disease, the idea of an “erased de Kooning” is sort of ominous.

(Some footnoted digressions about Jack Daniel Distillery… after the fold…)

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August 4, 2010

Katya Mezhibovskaya’s Packaging Thesis

The packages above are from Katya Mezhibovskaya’s 2008 SVA Thesis Project: “Access/Excess.”

“We go to the supermarket in order to acquire materials necessary for our physical survival. My goal is to remind people of the necessity of their intellectual survival as well. In essence, Access Excess is an attempt to re-brand knowledge in an effort to welcome back, unearth, or spark the curiosity and thirst for meaningful information.”

–Katya Mezhibovskaya

Although I like to wax philosophical about packaging, I never actually took a philosophy class.

Some of Mezhibovskaya’s “re-packaged” ideas are very apropos of our recent Ballantine Ale Cans stories and I totally get. (Modernism/Flatness, Jasper Johns, Readymade/Found Objects…)

Certain other packages, however, I am not well-read enough to fully appreciate… I don’t know Roland Barthes from a die-cut hole in the ground. (but maybe it’s high time I opened a can of “Semiotician.”)

Katya Mezhibovskaya is currently a book jacket designer for Vintage Books / Random House. Her web site appears to be in progress and under construction, but some of her work is also online at Book Cover Archive.

(Photos of her installation, after the fold…)

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August 2, 2010

Painted Bronze (Ale Cans)

We featured a photo of Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) a couple of years ago, but didn’t really go into the full story. Here now are three versions:

1. The “two beer cans” story

On left: Willem de Kooning in 1950 (photo by Rudy Burckhardt ); on right Jasper Johns standing behind his dealer, Leo Castelli

“Somebody told me that Bill de Kooning said that you could give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans and he could sell them. I thought, what a wonderful idea for a sculpture.”

Jasper Johns
As quoted in “Jasper Johns” by Richard Francis
(via: Abbeville Press)

The “son-of-a-bitch” in question was art dealer, Leo Castelli—and Abstract-Expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning’s crack about him was essentially saying that Castelli was such a great salesman that he could sell even crappy art—(i.e.: a couple of beer cans).

This was the story most frequently carried in mass-media newspapers & magazines: that in 1960, based on de Kooning’s remark, Johns made a sculpture — Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) — which were, indeed, sold by his dealer, Leo Castelli. The moral of the story as far as the general public was concerned? That art dealers are unscrupulous? That modern art is for suckers? That Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) is a cynical joke? (Because what could be more worthless and debased than a couple of beer cans?)

2. The “Formal Concerns” story

“The Beer cans’ nature as containers, and moreover, as containers for drink, implies they may be full or empty, which Johns make explicit by puncturing the top of one, leaving the other closed. Johns has often worked through a process of negation, making an inquiry and then seeing if the opposite is possible. This thesis/antithesis approach is united in one work in Painted Bronze by including two cans exemplifying the empty/full contrast.

… unless someone picked up the individual cans, which are not attached to the base, the fact that the ‘open’ can is light and the ‘closed’ can is solid bronze and therefore heavy would never be communicated.”

Wendy Weitman
Jasper Johns: Ale Cans and Art
American Art of the 1960s

At a time when abstract art was cool, and representational art not
so much so, Johns made a name for himself by finding ways of depicting
things that were not exactly “things” at all. More like 2-dimensional
symbols — targets, flags, maps, letters & numbers. De Kooning known
for doing gestural paintings — sometimes with a wide house painter’s
brush — according to Johns, once said to his, “I’m a house painter and
you’re a sign painter.”

With his sculpture, too, there was always a question about whether or not they really constituted representational art. Is a cylinder a representation of a can or an abstract form? If you paint graphics and letters on its surface are you then a representational artist? Or more like a sign painter, as de Kooning asserted?

“Jasper Johns has produced a painted sculpture of a pair of ale cans, heavier than the real ones but seemingly just as real (and what’s a Ballantine can anyway and does it depend on who makes it and all that?).”

Richard Meltzer
The Aesthetics of Rock

But if Johns built his reputation on a foundation of flat, non-representational imagery, he then —(like Dylan going electric)— confounded expectations and got pretty damn representational with a series of etchings depicting his own sculptures, Including quite a few based on the “Ale Cans.” (de Kooning, himself, had shifted away from purely abstract paintings, to representational—though still expressionistic—paintings of women.)

Then again, some of these works were based—no longer on two separate cans—but on the front and back of one flattened out can. A mechanical or a press proof version of the original can. In 1968 John’s puts out a limited edition portfolio of these prints, entitled “1st Etchings.”

Johns alerts the viewer that this suite is devoted to his sculpted work by affixing an actual unsoldered Ballantine can to the wooden portfolio cover.

…Thus for the first appearance of Painted Bronze in the portfolio, Johns incorporated a real object but cleverly came up with a two-dimensional version of it.

Wendy Weitman
Jasper Johns: Ale Cans and Art
American Art of the 1960s

(The 3rd story, after the fold…)

(more…)

July 20, 2010

Die-Cut, Package-Shaped Recipe Booklets

Front & back of the “White House Cereals” booklet (via eBay)

Sometimes food manufacturers put out promotional booklets of recipes.
Sometimes these booklets are shaped like packages.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s the printing industry developed a new technique for producing attractive books. First marking an outline of a product or an illustration on wooden rollers, printers then inserted thin blades on the outline, which cut out shapes on paper. The end result was a recipe booklet that caught the consumer’s attention, helped with product identification, and promoted sales.

Vintage Cookbooks and Advertising Leaflets
by Sandra A. Norman and Karrie K. Andes
(via: Months of Edible Celebrations)

(Many more examples, after the fold…)

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July 19, 2010

Presidential Packaging as Op Art

(Not optical-illusion “op art,” but opinion/editorial op-ed art.)

Yesterday’s batch of editorials in the NY Times, about President Obama’s prospects for a future term, were illustrated with satirical cleaning products.

By no means is this the first time we’ve compared our President to packaged goods. These black & white packages above (by Abbott Miller and Kristin Spilman from Pentagram) hark back to an earlier book cover for The Selling of the President 1968 (on right).

One thing I’m puzzling over—the illustrations are definitely black & white in my edition of the the paper and online, but in Richard Shear’s copy, the illustrations were apparently in full color, or so he claims.

Either Connecticut is getting a much fancier edition of the NY Times than they deliver here on Staten Island, or there is some powerful, packaging/color synesthesia at work here! (Such that: we’re so accustomed to seeing brightly colored packages that, even when they are reproduced in black & white, our minds supply the color.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 16, 2010

Chris Von Szombathy

Chris Von Szombathy Part of his “77 Bottles” series—glass and/or plastic containers, acrylic (2008–2009)

Some package-related artworks by Vancouver-based, audio/visual artist, Chris Von Szombathy. Above, one of his the bottle/jar sentences lined up in rows. Like those sentence structure diagrams we had to do in Junior High School—only creative. Word-choice as consumer-choice: the bottles & jars that you keep on a shelf in your head. From which to choose your words. Carefully. (A limited vocabulary of 77 words)

“What I … work at is trying to keep my mind even to maintain a decent quality of life. But when that’s steady and I'm feeling good I like to go to toy stores and grocery stores. I really love to collect things that have the proper guidelines so I love looking for old tins. I have tons of old soda cans, boxes or various bits… Anything old.. especially if it’s orange, light blue or pale green. I really like things in those colours. Good speaking colours.”

Chris Von Szombathy (from an interview on FecalFace.com)

Below: red paint-as-ketchup and ketchup-as-blood—(as in: the blood of the tomato)—and we’re always happy to see anthropomorphic packages like the graphically-effervescent “marching” bottle, below.

It’s also important to note that the jar of peanut butter on the right, is the cover of his new book, “Fire Away.”

On left: “You'll Always Get What You Want If You Invent What Already Is”—acrylic on board (2010); on right: “Creative Condimentality”—polymer clay, wood, card, brush, etc. (2010)

Upper left: “Flav'R Full”—acrylic on card (2008); lower left: “the Shape of Things to Go”—polymer clay, styrofoam, inkjet stickers, etc. (2009); on right: “March”—digital painting (2006)

(More bottle/jar sentences, after the fold…)

(more…)

July 15, 2010

Brownjohn vs Cooper

Following yesterday’s thread about Robert Brownjohn’s conceptual-art-style stationery for Michael Cooper, Painter, Bobby Gill has suggested that Michael Cooper was so unaccomplished, that having had Brownjohn design his stationery was, perhaps, his only accomplishment.

“It was very much the style then to have a witty letterhead. Brownjohn designed one for this guy Michael Cooper, who was somebody who hung around, but he didn’t have much personality. The only thing this guy had done was to ask Brownjohn to design his stationery.”

Bobby Gill
(via: Robert Brownjohn sex and typography: 1925-1970, Life and Work)

Smells like hyperbole, right? Well, I thought so, and a little research shows that, in fact, Cooper’s life and accomplishments, when compared to Brownjohn’s, match up in a lot of ways.

1. They both designed album covers for the Rolling Stones.

Cooper photographed and art directed the cover (the first 3D album cover ever) for “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” (above, left)

Michael Cooper was in charge of the whole thing, under his leadership. It was handicrafts day… you make Saturn, and I'll make the rings… People always ask, Are John and George in there? … They are all in there. And Paul and Ringo… we had to put a stop to it. We were getting the whole of Sergeant Pepper in there, just for the hell of it. It was getting late and Michael finally got Saturn suspended… It was really funny… we should have done a gig that night.

Keith Richards, 1971 (via: Time Is On Our Side)

(Regarding “Satanic Majesties” see also: Tony Meeuwissen)

Brownjohn designed the album cover for “Let it Bleed.” (above, right)—(Photography by Don McAllester; Cake by Delia Smith)

2. They both had smoking habits (also heroin)

They both were smokers. In yesterday’s post we showed photos of Brownjohn and Cooper, as young men. Details from those photos, above, show them each with a cigarette in hand. See also: Brownjohn’s design for a Bachelor’s brand cigarette pack. (Note: we have an ongoing interest in photos of celebrity smokers. See: George Arents Jr. and Bridget Riley’s Rolling Papers)

Robert “Bj” Brownjohn had already made a name for himself as a designer
in 1950s New York when he arrived in London in 1960. He claimed that he
came over for the city’s creative energy. His girlfriend, the
super-chic fashion designer Kiki Byrne, remembers it differently. “You
could get heroin on the National Health back then,” says Byrne. “And Bj
did have a problem.”

Via: Matt’s Morgue

Cooper has been described as “A heroin addict whose worsening condition confined him to a wheelchair.”

(More similarities, after the fold…)

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July 13, 2010

Robert Brownjohn’s Bachelor Pack

Robert Brownjohn’s ill-fated “Bachelor” cigarette pack concept from 1961: a great example of how a package can illustrate its contents with literal isometric views on each side. (Similar to the Long Egg 10-pack carton)

Why so ill-fated? From her book on Brownjohn’s life and work, Emily King provides an explanation and an object lesson in client relations for graphic designers:

Seldom straying far from a smoker’s hand, a cigarette packet is a de facto personal accessory. As such, it must be stylish and, from the tobacco company’s point of view, it should advertise their product as explicitly as possible. Brownjohn’s design for Bachelor cigarettes achieved these two aims with perfect conceptual economy. In terms of stripped-down chic, the Bachelor packet is unbeatable. Moreover, there is no better way of identifying a product by its package than simply illustrating it on the surface of the box. Why this design never went further than maquette stage is something of a mystery. Player’s Cigarettes, the manufacturer of the Bachelor brand… remained a highly conservative concern. …it is easy to imagine Brownjohn’s lack of inhibition did not endear him to the traditionalists on the Player’s board.

According to Alan Fletcher, Player’s Cigarettes reneged on the design because Brownjohn bragged about his idea around town, effectively pre-empting the product launch.

Willie Landels remembers Brownjohn filling his maquette with tampons and handing it around to the clients. This gesture is unlikely to have gone over well. In addition to straightforward provocation, it was a brilliant subversion of the box’s pretence of transparency. Brownjohn was exposing his own collusion with the social norms that govern which items are fit for public display and which must remain hidden.

Emily King
Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography: 1925-1970 Life and Work

(Another version of Brownjohn’s Bachelor pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

July 9, 2010

South Pacific Beer Label Fighting Shields

Far left: Kaipel Ka’s “Six to Six shield” shield from the National Gallery of Australia; all others from the The British Museum collection

While beer labels have featured “shields” for some time, it was news to me that, in Papua New Guinea, shields sometimes feature beer labels.

The traditional medieval heraldry of beer-brand crests may seem far removed from any violent connotations, but these shields, emblazoned with iconography from South Pacific Brewery’s product line, were seriously intended as protection in battle.

When inter-group warfare recommenced in the
1980s, people in the Wahgi area of the Highlands of Papua New
Guinea started making fighting shields after a gap of fifty years.
Wooden shields were used initially, but the subsequent introduction
of guns into the conflict led some Wahgi men to replace them with
metal ones made from car bodies or 44-gallon drums.Today the use of
wooden shields indicates ritual restraint, as distinct from the
metal shields required by the bloodier gun
warfare.

Michael O’Hanlon
Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands

(And what are ”ritually restrained battles” if not the very definition of a “team sport”?….)

To fight is an integral part of life for many highlanders of Papua New Guinea. A system of revenge skirmishes called ‘payback’ had created a seemingly endless cycle of reprisals and retaliations. Fighting in this area could be considered almost a form of sport with clans pitching themselves against enemy clans. The slogan “six 2 six” originally an invitation to party all night long in the Wahgi valley area, has been appropriated into a hostile expression intended to unnerve opponents. In this context, six 2 six, literally means “we will fight you from dawn until dusk, 6am to 6pm”. Commissioned to replicate painted shield designs for various warring groups, [Kaipel] Ka’s work visually acts in much the same way as football team colours.

Ka has incorporated beer advertising designs such as South Pacific lagers birds of paradise and the border design found on cartons of San Miguel lager.

© National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010

On left: vintage can of South Pacific Export Lager; on right artist/sign-painter, Kaipel Ka next to to one of his painted wooden shields.

Kaipel’s own explanation of his use of the SP design was that he had been asked by senior men to incorporate a representation of a beer bottle on the shield, to make the point that “it was beer alone which had precipitated this fighting”. (The war followed the breakdown of negotiations for compensation after an inebriated Senglap [clan] man had fallen from a Dange [clan]-owned vehicle.) Rather than including a picture of a beer bottle, Kaipel decided instead to make the point by using the SP design as a whole”

At one level, then, this design parallels those that express regret. At another level, there is also something appropriate in the use of beer. Beer drinking is often a “group” matter, just as warfare is. As Marie Reay observes “Clansmen fight together; they also drink together.”

Dr. Michael O’Hanlon
Anthropologist and current Director of the Pitt River Museum

(more…)

July 6, 2010

Two Types of Tree Packaging

On left: “Ubiquitous”; on right: “Flora”

1. The 2009 sculptures from Naoko Ito’s “Urban Nature” series, above feature tree branches contained in stacked jars. I like how she uses jars to do what jars generally do: encapsulating something from nature. What’s different in her case—(and a little… well, jarring)—is that their natural contents appear to have been preserved in place. There are even jars to contain the empty spaces between the branches.

When I first saw these pictures, I thought the jars worked sort of like 3-dimensional pixels—dividing up the branches into smaller containable bits that, from a distance, still comprised a recognizable whole.

Now I think they’re a bit darker than that. They are beginning to remind me of the inexplicable jungle-crystallizing virus in J.G. Ballard’s “The Crystal World.” Beautiful and uncanny, but ultimately representing an unsurvivable form of preservation. Which, come to think of it, is maybe a pretty good metaphor for food packaging in general.

(via: The Spring 2010 issue of the Visual Arts Journal)

2. This morning I happened to see a Huffington Post story entitled “Tree Life Box Creates New Trees from Packaging Waste.” Which led me to the Tree Life Box™ website.

Paul Stamets’s recycled corrugated cartons with tree seeds

“The Tree Life Box™ is made of recycled paper fiber. In this fiber, we have inserted a wide variety of tree seeds, up to a hundred, dusted with mycorrhizal
fungal spores. The mycorrhizal fungi protect and nurture the young
seedlings. For millions of years, plants and beneficial fungi have
joined together in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.”

One caveat: I’m currently reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-sided (How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)” and I am, therefore, ultra-conscious (and a little embarrassed) that I may be ending this post on a very positive note. What to do?

Not that it significantly detracts from the carbon-offsets of actually growing trees—but, still, consider this… the first step in The Tree Life Box’s post-consumer afterlife: “1) Tear your Tree Life Box™ into large pieces so it will fit inside a plastic bag.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 2, 2010

Pre-Op Packaging

Left photo: from The Minnesota Historical Society; middle photo: from Worthpoint; right photo: from JSF0864’s Flickr Photostream

(Pre-Op-Art, I mean)… Vintage packaging with radial spirals or concentric circles that just can’t be contained by the edges of the box:

“The outermost circle is not contained within the boundaries of the box, a graphic device that induces viewers to complete the circle in their own minds. This tendency, though subconscious, nevertheless causes viewers to participate in the dynamism of the package design. Moreover, when viewers extend the design in their own minds, they are also expanding the psychological impact of the package.”

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

Is it just me or is there something kind of compelling about messages conveyed via hypnotic geometry? (See also: The Bridget Riley Look)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 24, 2010

Sand Bags & MRE Boxes

“This is where we pour the words into a jar, as if they were water. As if a jar of water was the same as a river. This is where we try to make a coherent narrative out of chaos.”

Nick Flynn
The Ticking Is the Bomb

Just finished reading Nick Flynn’s “The Ticking Is the Bomb”—a memoir in which he traces the connective tissue between his life as an expectant American father and the political and cultural implications of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs.

I’ve been a fan of Flynn’s writing since I picked up his first book of poetry, Some Ether at the library a few years back. The Ticking Is the Bomb may be his best work yet. While it might seem a risky gambit to interleave ones own stories in between stories of Iraqi torture victims, the effect is bracing. Rather than just compartmentalizing these disturbing news stories, as we often do, Flynn succeeds in showing how post-9/11 torture policy might just implicate us on a more personal level.

What does it have to do with packaging? Two ubiquitous examples of military packaging played major roles as props in many of the Abu Ghraib photos: the sandbag (re-purposed as a blindfold/hood), and the “meal, ready-to-eat” (MRE) box that detainees were forced to stand on while being subjected to torture. There was also a Huffington Post article about the use of these boxes and their appearance in the background of many of the other photos. (See also: Product Placement at Gitmo)

(More after the fold…)

(more…)

May 18, 2010

Florida Water Soap

I wrote about Florida Water at length back in September of 2008, but having recently picked up a bar of their soap at Pathmark, I figured I might as well post another photo.

The illustrations are are notable for having been designed in the 1800s by George Du Maurier, the author of Trilby. (See also: Svengali)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 13, 2010

Roly Poly Books

Photo from Wendy Book

Roly Poly "box books" are pop-up books by Kees Moerbeek.

A package that is also a book, although the way this book works is more like a polyhedral scroll. (It’s structure ties into the geometry of the Nescafe display packaging from the previous post—splitting cubes into right-triangle prisms.)

Photo from Wendy Book

Does it strike you as sort of counter-intuitive that a cube-shaped box-book should be called roly poly? It did to me until I remembered about those segmented “roly poly” bugs.

(See a video of a Roly Poly book, after the fold…)

(more…)

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