Box Vox

packaging as content

January 28, 2011

Wonder Bread Raincoat, etc.

Wonderbread-Clothing

1. Wendy Hill’s Wonder Bread raincoat, made for her sewing class in high school. (circa: 1960s)

2. Catherine McEver’s similarly waterproof bread bag outfits, envisioned for Barbie dolls. (See: Wonder Bread Barbies) This one is “Prom Barbie.” (circa 2010)

3. The Wonder® bread company, itself, appears to have also noticed this connection between rain gear and their plastic bread bag packaging, as evidenced by these complimentary rain bonnets (some of which are for sale on eBay)…

RainBonnets

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 27, 2011

Package-Shaped Compressed T-Shirts

CompressedT-packs

The compressed, cube-shaped Muji T-shirt led me to wonder about other possible shapes… and it turns out (of course) that there are plenty of package-shaped compressed T-shirts.

These particular images are from Compress T.

Mostly flat, silhouetted shapes of bottles—(and jars and cans, etc.)—but they also have compressed T-shirts that are contained in simulated packaging—(e.g. the T-shirt in the “Kit Kat” candy wrapper (bottom, left) and the steak-shaped “Beefy-T” in a meat tray (bottom, right).

(See also: Shrink-wrapped Meat Tray Packaging for Clothes)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 26, 2011

Muji Mad Money

MujiCube

On the subject of compressed packaging:

1. For my birthday, I was given this Muji “Shrink Wrap T-Shirt Compresse”—a tee shirt compressed into a more compact cube-shape.

2. Which reminded me of a particular charm on my mom’s charm bracelet: a dollar bill folded into a tiny gold cube with one side glass—(“in case of emergency break glass”). I remember her charm being something like the one above (from eBay) only I seem to recollect that the charms on her bracelet were 24K and the denomination of the folded bill was $50.

3. Which, in turn, reminds me of the “paper folding problem.”

(See also: Birthday Mathematics, Packaging Charms, and Cigarette Pack Charms)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 21, 2011

Rat Fink Packaging

RatFink1ShotOn left: packaging for Ed Roth licensed products from House Industries; on right: Rat Fink in a can of 1 Shot paint from Jalopy Journal

RatFinkRevelle2 I was terrible at building models as a kid and was always a little disappointed that the plastic parts weren’t already colored since I couldn’t hope to paint them as nicely as the picture on the box. Still, when I was a kid in the sixties I remember asking for and receiving a Revelle Rat Fink model. I think it was one of the hot rod series, although I was really mainly into the rat…

Anyway, it seems I was in good company seeing as how House Industries co-founder, Andy Cruz was also into R.F.

“…Around this time, Cruz’s obsession with the Southern California hot-rod culture epitomized by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the car builder and illustrator famed for his grotesque Rat Fink caricatures, and was spending all his extra money on Rat Fink models, iron-ons, decals and other ephemera. “It hit me one day,” he says. “Why not have my hobby work for me?” In 1996, Cruz’s revelation led to a licensed collaboration with Roth that yielded his Rat Fink font, a translation of Roth’s hand-lettered type into the digital realm.”

–Jesse Ashlock, AIGA

Ratfinkfonts I’ve gotten plenty of use out of those Rat Fink fonts, but it’s interesting to learn the back story behind their getting into this area in such big way.

The most important part of inspiration is being true to one’s sources, so we jumped at the opportunity to work with hot rodding legend Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Ed was a pop artist, accomplished letterer and a consummate self-promoter, which are all cues we took when conceptualizing our first foray into licensing. By combining our maniacal penchant for authenticity and our appreciation for Ed’s impact on the masses, we reintroduced his genius with eight fonts, 32 pieces of artwork and an authentic Revell-style model box.

“Rat Fink” House Industries

(Note: the can of 1 Shot paint in Rat Fink’s hand above)

(More of their pinstriping T-Shirt cans, after the fold…)

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January 13, 2011

Packaging & What Lies Beneath

Dom-HM

While looking into the orthographically-projecting “Dish Doctor” box, I happened to see the Marc Newson designed “Black Box” for Dom Pérignon (via: PopSop) which reminded me that, in addition to the narrowly defined orthographic projection, there are other, less geometrically exacting ways that the surface of a package can reveal its contents.

Newson’s “Black Box” is essentially a black polycarbonate “clamshell” package with a green strap, but since the package itself has a label, it’s hard to distinguish it from an actual bottle at first glance.

The H&M shirt box design by Linn Gustafsson uses whimsical illustration of a striped shirt—but without the extra front & side views of the “Dish Doctor” box. Here, the box in its entirety is meant to represent the shirt contained. (i.e.: no background.)

The photo below (from today’s NY Times) show some of Rick Genest’s skeletal tattoos, which achieve a similar reveal-what-lies-beneath effect. Seeing that he’s a smoker set me to thinking about his cigarette brand…

PackSkin Upper photo by Nicola Formichetti; lower photos of Robert Brownjohn’s Bachelor Cigarettes packaging

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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…)

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December 17, 2010

Shoe Box

Shoe-Box

Shoe-shaped shoebox: a student project by Ping Ping Tung in 2006 at Monash Uni.

Another box featuring orthographic projection of contents. The laces seem to heighten the package-as-proxy-for-product thing. (See also Baby Star Shoe Box and Shoe Box with Grommets)

(A similar orthographic-box concept, after the fold…)

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October 22, 2010

Catastrophe as Category Disruption

Destruction-GlobalWarming

In our previous post we touched on Coca Cola’s reluctant product placement in The Road—a movie portraying life after an unnamed cataclysm, where there is no longer any sort of plant life and the only food left for survivors are dwindling supplies of packaged foods—(or other survivors, if you swing that way). No manufacturing has survived in the world Cormac McCarthy has envisioned for The Road, although here and there some labeled canned goods are hoarded and stolen like some new type of currency.

Question: If “family brand” soda companies were hesitant to be “associated with cannibalism” are other end-of-the-world scenarios any less damning?

One brand that seems to think so, is Diesel. In 2007 the jeans company named after petroleum fuel oil, gleefully embraced global cataclysm as their new brand promise with their “Global Warming Ready” campaign.

(Note: Although the subject is “global warming” the narrator of this video sounds a lot more like BP CEO, Tony Hayward than Al Gore…)

Accepted by many as a satirical reaction to sanctimonious and self-serving “cause marketing,” but looked at from another angle, Diesel’s campaign is a lot like those movies and TV shows from the 1950s and 60s (mentioned in Tuesday’s fallout shelter post) that tended to “promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.” 

Granted, the fantasy of living in a watery, less crowded NYC does have a certain appeal—(like an early J.G. Ballard novel)—but isn’t that appeal fundamentally anti-social? When most all the competition has been conveniently eliminated, don’t we each imagine that, as a potential Adam or Eve, we might look a bit better to the opposite sex?

Do manufacturers entertain similar fantasies? In Diesel’s post-cataclysmic world, cool companies (like Diesel) have somehow survived to party on. One imagines they must have fewer customers in this less-populated, beach-party world, but doubtless they have fewer surviving competitors as well. (The ulimate “category disruption”)

Diesel, the fashion brand, now offers a fresh take on the specter of a globally warmed planet:

More beaches!

In print ads promoting its spring/summer collection, the Italian-based clothing company depicts landscapes that have been transformed by environmental disaster. The proud buildings of Manhattan and the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore are half-submerged in water from melted glaciers. Paris is a steamy jungle. Life looks pretty awesome, though. Diesel's models are dressed fashionably if barely (to accommodate the weather) and they lounge amid this hip dystopia in glamorous unconcern, fanning themselves or applying suntan lotion to one another's tawny backs.

High-Water Marketing: Climate-Change Clothes, a Little Smug on the Hip
Libby Copeland, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 18, 2007

(More photos, video and article, after the fold…)

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June 28, 2010

The Bridget Riley Look

RileyLook

Upper left: painter, Bridget Riley (mid-sixties photo by John Goldblatt); on right “Paper Caper” brand “Op Art” paper dress and packaging; lower left: detail of 1966 photo by F.C. Gundlach of Brigitte Bauer, wearing an “Op Art” swimsuit by Sinz Vouliagmeni (via Art Blart); on right: “Antivert” Vertigo drug packaging (via: DJ Misc)

"Manufacturers of all kinds have been trying to give their packaging the Bridget Riley Look, and have harassed the gallery with unwelcome offers. The most ironic proposition to date has come from the manufacturer of a headache remedy.”

John Canaday, “That’s Right It’s Wrong”
The New York Times, Mar. 14, 1965

Some more recent examples of Bridget Riley’s continuing influence, below:

OpArtPacks

Upper left: Siggi Eggertsson’s Coke poster for Armchair Media; on right and below: Dhanyhaploy Nutkasem’s “Optical Illusion Packaging” conflates optical illusions with seasickness and “dizzy headaches”; 2nd and 3rd row left: Meeta Panesar’s “Op Art” wine packaging—note “Op Art” typography—(via: PopSop); lower right: Akroe’s Vogue Cigarette packs (via: PopSop)

(Tomorrow: the product category that has most enthusiastically embraced “the Bridget Riley look”.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 4, 2010

3 Trapezoidal Packaging Patents

HatBox

Following up on our discussion of trapezoidal boxes, here are three earlier patents. Unlike the Bratz brand’s unsuccessful attempt to trademark trapezoidal-shaped cardboard boxes, in general, these inventors sought to patent the manner of construction rather than the final polyhedral form.

First up: a collapsible trapezoidal hat box from 1901. (above)

TrapezoidalMilkCarton

(One more, after the fold…)

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April 12, 2010

Art, Culture & Upscale Canned Ham

I’ve had this photo of Le “Super” Jambon Extra (on left) on my hard disk for a while because I liked the shape of the can and the typography. (from: Ian W. Mitchell’s public gallery)

Then I noticed Hydo74’s “limited edition” Nike shoe box, on right. (via: CreateID). It seems to include an elaborate sliding lid like an old-fashioned roll-top desk, but mainly it reminded of the shape of the French canned ham package, so here they are both.

(And as long as we’re talking about canned ham…)

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March 23, 2010

Playstation Clothing

PSClothing1

PS Clothing: brand development and package design by GR/DD. Surprisingly subtle and retrained packaging for video game clothing. (In contrast to, say, X-box)

(Another photo, after the fold…)

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February 17, 2010

Silly Putty & L’eggs

(Two famous egg-shaped, plastic packages.)

SillyPuttyInset2 Silly Putty: invented around 1943—(either by Dow Corning’s engineers or by inventors working for General Electric)—but ultimately marketed and sold as “Silly Putty” in the early 1950s by Peter Hodgson. Originally called “Nutty Putty” and “Bouncing Putty,” Hodgson changed the name to “Silly Putty.”

As Easter was fast approaching, Hodgson decided to package 1-ounce chunks of putty into plastic eggs and he sold them for $1.

In February of 1950, Hodgson introduced Silly Putty at the International Toy Fair In New York. The other toy marketers saw little use for Hodgson’s Silly Putty and encouraged him to abandon his plans to promote it. Without any regard to their discouraging comments, Hodgson brought the Silly Putty production to a converted barn in North Branford, CT. He continued to package the Silly Putty in plastic eggs and these were shipped to toy stores in pasteboard egg crates that he acquired from the Connecticut Cooperative Poultry Association. Although this was an innovative idea, it didn’t catch on as Hodgson had hoped, until he got some help from an unexpected ally. That August the writer for the Talk of the Town section of “The New Yorker” magazine wrote an article about Silly Putty after he had discovered it in a bookstore. Hodgson shortly thereafter received orders for over a quarter million eggs of Silly Putty within just three days time.

–Retro Planet

(So while it was in no way an “Easter” product, it turns out that Silly Putty was packaged in eggs—which were, themselves, packaged in egg cartons—on account of Easter.)

Leggs-inset L’eggs: The other well-known example of egg-shaped packaging is from the 1970s.

The L’eggs naming, package and logo were created by designer Roger Ferriter, working in the design studio of Herb Lubalin Associates in New York City in 1969. On the morning of the scheduled presentation to the Hanes Corporation of the marketing and packaging ideas for the new low cost pantyhose launch, Ferriter was not satisfied that the work was sufficiently creative. In an effort to revisit the name and packaging one last time, he attempted to “experience” the product in some new way, hoping that the exercise would suggest a new creative direction for the branding. Among his efforts, he attempted to compress a pair of pantyhose in his fist, wondering how compact the product could become. Staring at his clenched fist with the pantyhose inside he was struck with the possibility that the package could be an egg. Just as quickly, he realized that egg rhymes with leg, and then adding the popular mid century marketing boost of giving a product name some French sounding twist, he incorporated the l’ (French for “the” when followed by a vowel such as the “e” of eggs) and arrived at L’eggs. Some sketches were prepared in time for the presentation, including a logo that incorporated two egg-influenced letter “g”s and thus was born one of the most successful product launches in history.

Wikipedia’s entry on “L’eggs”

(In 1991 L’eggs switched from their plastic, egg-shaped container to a (vaguely) egg-shaped paperboard carton.)

Even though “the egg” is one of those oft-cited examples of nature’s perfect packaging, the egg-shaped plastic containers of both companies always required additional packaging and were sometimes even put into boxes.

(Boxes and more L’eggs, after the fold…)

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January 27, 2010

Canned Underhylere

Njord1

More canned underwear—this one by Copenhagen-based designers, Helene Johansen & Kristoffer Jonsson. (Another cross-category, canned clothing pack.)

(One more photo, after the fold…)

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January 20, 2010

Controller-Shaped Underwear Packaging

X-BoxUnderwear Upper photo: from AsusEpoxy’s PhotoBucket; Lower photo from Aksys Nation! blog

Search online for “underwear” + “control” and what do you find? There’s women’s “control underwear” (AKA: “shapewear”—descendants of girdles). There’s men’s scent control underwear (for hunters).

And now: underwear for gamers—this one packaged in an X-box controller-shaped tin. (Other shapes too.) Game tie-in product licensing, run amok? Or is there something more behind this underwear-as-gamegear trend?

Consider JennyLC Chowdhury’s Intimate Controllers:

“Intimate Controllers” is a platform where video games are played by couples touching each other.  The platform consists of two controllers, a bra for the female player and boxer shorts for the male player.  Each controller is embedded with 6 sensors placed with varying degrees of intimacy in relation to the body part with which they correspond. Players must pass game levels together and in doing so, game play results in increasingly intimate positioning. The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video game play.

from JennyLC Chowdhury’s Graduate Thesis for
NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program

(An Intimate Controllers diagram, after the fold…)

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