packaging as content

May 10, 2012

1969 Polaroid Annual Report

This was an image I left out of an earlier post about rainbow-striped package design. (See: The Optics of Rainbow Striped Package Design)

It’s a nice annual report cover that I found on designer, Paul Giambarba’s site. It’s unclear where he designed the annual report, but he was surely the man behind Polaroid’s rainbow branding.

I had in mind I might save it for June (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month) but what with the President’s recent support of gay marriage, I thought I’d put my oblique observance out there a little sooner. (i.e.: graphic meanings of rainbow & 1969.)

Another company whose rainbow iconography would later acquire unintended gay connotations: Apple Computer.

This page from a 1983 Apple Computer gift catalog.

2 brands, coincidentally positioned on the right side of history.

April 16, 2012

The Trickle-Up Effect

On left: one of Linden Gledhill’s photographs of paint reacting to sound vibrations; center: Patrick Hill’s “Gravity Wine” package design concept; on right: a painted jar from an Etsy listing (now down, but the same object appears on majama29’s Flickr Photostream)

I’m no economist, but I always suspected that being wealthy didn’t automatically make someone a “job creator” and I wondered whether the whole “trickle-down” theory of economics might not make a lot more sense the other way round.

As it turns out, there is a “trickle-up” theory:

The trickle up effect argues itself as more effective than the trickle down effect because people who have less tend to buy more. In other words, the poor are more inclined than the wealthy to spend their money. This being so, proponents of the trickle up effect believe that if the lower and lower-middle classes are given benefits, such as tax breaks or subsidies, the increased funds would be spent at a much higher rate than would the upper class, given similar fund increases. Furthermore, the trickle up effect argues, many upper-class individuals do not spend their entire yearly salary to begin with, which is an indication that they will not spend any additional funds. Instead, they will save additional funds, thereby withholding those funds from the economy and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Wikipedia’s Entry on The Trickle Up Effect

Gravity-defying, paint-dripped ceramic planters project from The Lovely Cupboard

(More trickle-up imagery, after the fold…) (more…)

January 16, 2012

Super PAC Packaging

As we enjoy a new, hyperbolic political season, generously funded by large amounts of Super Political Action Committee money, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at some earlier types of Super Pac.

Not surprisingly, the name was previously associated with packaging.

SuperPac, Inc., whose logo appears at top, offers “A Tradition of Excellence in Flexographic Printing.”

SuperPAC™ (logo: above center) is a trademark of Thomasville Furniture:

Thomasville’s promise to provide our customers with the best overall kitchen, bath, and other room solutions initiated our development of SuperPAC, our patent pending packaging technique.

And SuperPac is also the name of a British company that makes a car stereo accessory. (Logo by Frankman Design)

Superpac is the new way to hold your detachable car stereo front. Designed to replace the dull black plastic case supplied with most car stereos, the Superpac offers you a stylish way to protect your cherished face-off style car stereo.

Mastey de Paris carries a SuperPac “Intensive Reconstructor Conditioner for Stressed, Damaged Hair” (above, right)

Superpac reconstructs damaged hair, rebuilding and reinforcing the hair’s protein chains. Superpac enables hair to retain its elasticity and structural integrity with newfound bounce and resilience.

Mastey de Paris

There was also a Timberland Super Pac boot. (via: Gwar Izm)

Nowadays, a candidate whose political campaign benefits from Super PAC money is not supposed to “coordinate directly” with his or her Super PAC benefactor. In practice, however, a candidate’s Super PAC is often run by a close ally—a Super PAC man. (e.g., Jon Stewart is Steven Colbert’s “Super PAC man”)

Not to be confused with an earlier “Super Pac-Man.”

Top & center: Commodore 64 “Super Pac-Man” packaging from Moby Games; bottom photo: a General Mills Pac-Man cereal with “Super Pac-Man Marshmallows” from Jason Liebig’s flickr Photostream

Now, if we were willing to be more liberal about the spelling of the term—accepting say “PAK” as a reasonable variant (as in Political Action Kommittee?)—then there’s even more to think about.

(More, after the fold…)

(more…)

November 1, 2011

Food Stamp Beer Photos

While looking for Ballantine XXX Ale bottles for a post last month, I found the illicit-looking photo in the upper right corner.

From a series of photographs by Brayden Olson for Vice Magazine. I like the paparazzi flash and intestinal-pink^* backgrounds of these photos, but I have some misgivings about the article it illustrates. Apparently it’s possible at certain bodegas in NYC to get around the regulations prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages.

“… since receipts at most bodegas in Brooklyn aren’t itemized and products in the store are never scanned (most likely because they are thieves), there is no way to tell what you actually bought.”

“Food Stamp Beer Reviews” Vice

I cringe to think of this article being used to punch more holes in the already tenuous social safety net. With unemployment so high, the demographic of food stamp recipients has clearly changed.

Food policy experts and human resource administrators are quick to point out that the overwhelming majority of the record 38 million Americans now using food stamps are their traditional recipients: the working poor, the elderly and single parents on welfare.

But they also note that recent changes made to the program as part of last year’s stimulus package, which relaxed the restrictions on able-bodied adults without dependents to collect food stamps, have made some young singles around the country eligible for the first time.

Hipsters on food stamps, by Jennifer Bleyer
Salon, March 15, 2010

If “unemployment” can somehow still be viewed as a character defect in the minds of those who have recently characterized the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “unemployed, uneducated and uninformed” — this bodega beer thing may eventually wind up on Fox News as a way of discrediting these new, younger food stamp recipients and food assistance programs in general.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

A footnoted digression: *The color “intensinal pink” is not my own invention. My father coined this term to describe the color of my grandmother’s house on Long Island.

May 19, 2011

Mated Container Units

Yesterday’s post about the similar interlocking bottles, raised a number of questions. The patent drawings above date from 1963 to 2008, each showing a different patented method of connecting separate bottles. There are plenty of products that can be sold in pairs — shampoo & conditioner; 2-part epoxy; oil & vinegar — but what are consumers to make of it when these products are sold in interlocking bottles?

Are they anthropomorphic couples? Are they happily married? Are they promiscuous? Or are they more like puzzle pieces fitting together?

Or body parts fitting together?

The 69-ish innuendo of yesterday’s bottle structure (and the single quote marks ‘’ in Joy Lin’s Hustler Lubricant concept) is even more explicit in Franck Legoupil’ 2001 patent for a “Container Assemble of Two Nested Containers,” pictured above.

This same symmetrical gender-geometry is also at work in the “Mated Container Units” patented by Juris M. Mednis in 1986:

“A multi-purpose container unit whose hollow body, neck and shoulder sections are proportioned and constructed in a manner that allows interfacing and mating with an identical or mirror image unit of like size… The container has a neck and a recessed portion along its vertical axis which accepts and provides safe harbor and protection to the neck and closure portion of the mated unit whose corresponding body recess, in turn, accepts the neck and closure portion of a second container of the mated unit…”

(See what the “Mated Container Units” look like, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 13, 2011

Capitalist Box vs. Socialist Box

I saw this a while back on Packaging UQAM:

Sophie Valentine’s project for Louis Gagnon’s “Design Graphique Introduction” course at Canada’s UQAM. The project is “3D Typographic Expression” and her solution is shown above.

Socialism and capitalism are two realities that clearly oppose. However, Winston Churchill did not consider one better than the other. He said: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” To demonstrate this paradox, socialism is represented by eight small cubes attached to each other. While capitalism is represented by a cube equal to the size of eight.

Design Intro Blog

This interests me for a number of reasons.

A. The white “socialist” cube appears to be one of those hinged folding cube puzzles — sometimes called “magic cubes” — often used as an advertising promotion. I might be wrong. It may be hinged a little differently, but it would be ironic for “socialism” to be represented by an promotional object.

B. The Winston Churchill quote above seems to parallel the contrast that Chevron CEO, John Watson attempted (in his testimony to congress yesterday about oil company tax breaks) when he tried to suggest that the American people would rather share in Chevron’s prosperity than to have Chevron share in their sacrifice. (See also: Joe, The Plumber)

(More reasons, after the fold…)

(more…)

February 14, 2011

Frack Pack

Saw Gasland on TV a while back, so I knew about “fracking” and how it had seriously contaminated drinking water here in the United States, but I didn’t know that Canada was thinking of competing with us in the area of flammable drinking water!

Goût de schiste (“Good Taste of Quebec Shale”) is Valérie L’italien’s concept for the commercialization of this particular type of firewater. (d’eau flambé?)

Turning the perceived flaw of flammability into a product feature, she brings us: packaged (flammable) water.

Done as a project for Sylvain Allard’s packaging class at UQAM, Professor Allard has this to say about the new beverage:

… after having promised the moon to oil and gas companies, our good government finds itself in trouble because of the negative reaction of Quebecers who fear the environmental consequences of shale gas. In fact, dramatic stories have been reported in some American states where groundwater got contaminated with the shale gas. Pictures of taps that ignite were shown in the media…

Never mind, we must move forward announced Minister Nathalie Normandeau hammering that shale gas must create wealth. She never explains how this wealth will eventually come back to us though. In fact, like all our natural resources, profits seem more a vision of the mind than a reality. But Nathalie seems convinced that people just don’t get it and that against all odds, her government has the mandate to go forward.

In my packaging class, we believe we have the real solution to increase the collective wealth. Because shale gas is likely to contaminate our groundwater, why resist the temptation to exploit the bonanza? Indeed, what may seem like a catastrophe could become a true treasure. I named the shale gas carbonated water developed by my student Valerie Italian. After Perrier and Sanpellegrino, we would have the Good Taste of Quebec Shale. This particular carbonated water would be available in several flavors and come with a match to burn the excess gas…

via: Packaging UQAM (Read the full story: here)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 1, 2010

Charms Packaging

By “charms” I mean: Assorted Charms hard candy from the Charms Candy Company (now part of Tootsie Roll Industries).

After last Fridays post about “Packaging Charms” I thought it would be clever to do a post about “Charms Packaging. ” (Note the shallow symmetry of my thought process!)

Little did I suspect, there were actually a lot of interesting things to discover about Charms candy and its packaging.

Issued during World War II in U.S. combat rations as a supplemental energy food, their colorful outer wrappers were unique among the standard olive drab ration packages.

VictorySeeds.com

The label above-left shows the wrapper design included in ration packages during World War II. The photo top-right is the current Charms packaging. The inset photo (above-right) is a 1947 package from the Korean War.

If Charms candy wrappers were a graphic departure from the usual generic look of ration packaging, how suitable that the one below is shown on a Ration Type-K, Morale Series package—another graphic departure which we featured last May.

Photo via: US Military Forum

Charms candies are still included in U.S. military ration packs, but in recent years the brand has come under a cloud, apparently for failing to deliver on its implied brand promise. A fundamental definition of “charm” is that it’s “something believed to bring good luck.”

How paradoxical that, for many American soldiers today, Charms Candy is believed to bring exactly the opposite. How unlucky for the manufacturer that this idea has become so ingrained in G.I. culture.

Soldiers do not eat Charms candies. They are believed to be very bad luck. As soon as you find them in an MRE you throw them away.

Ehow: The History of Charms Candy Company

(Three more examples, after the fold…)

(more…)

October 20, 2010

Shelf Reliance

Following up on yesterday’s train of thought about 1960s fallout shelters and their stockpiles of canned goods—(it’s “end-of-the-world week”, here on boxvox)—we find that President Kennedy’s impulse to privatize civil defense has apparently evolved over the years into what we now call the “survivalist” (or “preparedness”) movement. There are a number of businesses catering to this constituency. Shelf Reliance is one of them:

SHELF RELIANCE is a company that specializes in food storage, storage rotation, and emergency preparedness products. Our goal is to help families prepare for whatever tomorrow may bring, allowing them to feel confident if disaster strikes.

(from the About Us section of their web site)

Where some survivalist food packaging emulates a generic, civil defense look, Shelf Reliance’s “Thrive” brand is light and airy and uses a pastel color-code to differentiate between food groups. Their products are even carried by Costco.

Food rotation, the concept introduced by Better Homes & Garden in the late 1950s, seems to now be an established practice for many Americans. (I hadn‘t realized that.) What is it that Shelf Reliance’s customers should be preparing for? According to their web site:

• Natural Disaster
• Terrorism
• Labor Strike
• Economic Depression
• Drought
• Crop Failure
• Personal Tragedy
• Civil Unrest
• Unemployment

One big change from the 1960s—nuclear fallout is not mentioned.

(Some food rotation products and survivalist videos, after the fold

(more…)

June 8, 2010

Helmut Smits’s Drum Kit (& other package-related works)

Drum Kit, 2003 (tin cans, metal wire)

“Helmut Smits is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.”

Not all of Helmut Smits’ work is package-related, but enough so that, if I were a more patient and strategic man, I could cherry-pick images from his web site to feature here—one at a time—for quite a while. Instead, I’m presenting them as I found them—all at once.

On On left: “0.26 Gallon of Oil” 2007 (1L Coca-Cola bottle filled with oil) Photo by Lotte Stekelenburg; on right: “The Real Thing” 2006 (An installation to filter Coca-Cola into clean drinking water.) Photo by Rick Messemaker

Above are two separate works from 2006 and 2007 that each involve Coca-Cola. When I look at these now, in 2010, because of what’s going on right now with the on-going BP oil spill, I cannot help but associate both of these artworks with that.

“I liked the fact that oil looks the same as Coca-Cola. One is: the product that America dominates the world with [Coca-Cola], the other is: the product that America consumes the most worldwide [oil].”

–Helmut Smits from an interview in Chief Magazine, Issue #7

The Coke bottle full of oil, I had assumed, was a reference to the petroleum used to make PET bottles. Like Luis Camnitzer’s “Coca Cola Bottle filled with a Coca Cola Bottle” here, too, a bottle that contains what it is made of. This, of course, is exactly the sort of negative connotation—(conflating Coke with crude oil)—that Coca-Cola was hoping to address with their recent “PlantBottle™” initiative.

In “the Real Thing” Smits ironically treats Coca-Cola as if it were polluted water—an impurity to be removed so that the water can be made “clean” enough for drinking again. (I’m guessing that, for the foreseeable future, Smits will not be one of those artists, invited by Coca-Cola to design a “limited edition” designer bottle.)

Below, Smits takes a more benign view of “roll-on” deodorant packaging…

(Several more of Helmut Smits works, after the fold…)

(more…)

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 10, 2010

Car Bottles: 3 Types

1. Car-shaped whisky bottles (photo by Beth Rose)

2. Beer-bottle-shaped cars (photo by Terry Whalebone of a vehicle from the Coors Museum in Burton-onTrent)

3. Bottles made from crashed cars…

… as a cautionary highway sign. On left: a Moscow-based crashed-car bottle for a Russian anti-drinking campaign; on right: a crashed-car bottle in Israel by Tel Aviv-based Y&R. (via: Copyranter)

February 23, 2010

Kinder Joy’s Dual-Chambered Egg Pack

Photo from SmALl CloUd …'s Flickr Photostream

Kinder Joy brings several favorite box vox themes together in one package.

1. First off, it’s another egg-pack, fitting nicely into our entirely egg-shaped week—(that, technically, should have begun with the Silly Putty/L’eggs post from last week)—and although Kinder Joy may be sold at Easter, the company, by no means, confines their marketing efforts to that time of year.

2. It’s another thermoformed, single-serve, peel-off pack in a metaphorical shape. Similar to the bottle & jar-shaped packets and the half-orange-shaped packs from earlier this month. In fact, Kinder Joy’s dual structure—one half for the edible treat; one half for the prize—is exactly like that of Alberto Ghirardello’s Salvo concept (where two halves of an orange break apart to form two separate containers).

3. Kinder Joy (like Kinder Surprise) is a “surprise package” and includes the classic, question-mark styling, typical of that tradition.

Photo on right (revealing prize) is from P.J.S.'s Flickr Photostream

(Case-packs & TV commercials , after the fold…)

(more…)

February 4, 2010

Buckfast Blowback

Photo by Kieran Dodds via: The New York Times

Some packaging-related content in an article in today’s New York Times…

Paralleling Russia’s battles with alcoholism—(see: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Campaign)—Scotland’s drinking problems are prompting legislation to try and curb alcohol consumption and its attendant bad behavior.

Unfortunately for Buckfast, the popularity of its caffeine-fortified “tonic wine” (with consumers in this market) also makes it a prominent symbol of a social problem.

…the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them)…

Legislation to curb drinking is of particular interest here in Scotland’s old industrial heartland, or the “Buckfast Belt,” where Buckfast is considered a regional favorite. The drink is so ubiquitous in this working-class town, not far from Glasgow, that some people call it Coatbridge Table Wine (others call it “loopy juice,” or, adding their own twist as they channel Travis Bickle, “Who’re you lookin’ at?” wine.) Buckfast is no newcomer to the market, having become popular in the first half of the 20th century, when it was prescribed by doctors for down-in-the-dumps miners and sold in drugstores.

One person’s helpful mood improver, though, is another’s worryingly effective stimulant. The drink is 15 percent alcohol by volume, a bit stronger than most wines. Also, each 750 milliliter bottle contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke.

For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle
By Sarah Lyall, NY Times, February 3, 2010

Interesting that—(like Vimto)—Buckfast began life as a health tonic. Sometime (when there’s time) boxvox must do a round-up of other contemporary products that began as Victorian patent medicines. (Like Coke, for instance.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 29, 2010

As Seen on TV

Blister-pack/clamshell wrap rage is old news, but Larry David manages to give it a terrifying new geopolitical spin when (in Season 7, Episode 2 of Curb Your Enthusiasm) he asks, “What am I, Mohammed Atta, I gotta get a box cutter?”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 26, 2009

Groppers

From Mankatt’s Flickr Photostream: a Roche Advertisement from the January 26, 1976 issue of Advertising Age (or maybe it was from Food Product Development Magazine). Either way, it illustrates another reason why an existing package might acquire an added graphic burst.

Roche, with the tagline, “The food improvers,” sought to promote their vitamin additives by suggesting that a product with flagging sales would benefit from a graphic burst with a product claim such as, “Now Fortified with 8 Essential Vitamins.”

I believe that “Groppers” is a fictional product because it seems doubtful that any of Roche’s clients would have wanted to be portrayed as the poster boy for declining sales.

The “how to claim a heath benefit” aspect of this ad also seems pertinent to the recent dialing down of the Smart Choice Program, now under scrutiny from the FDA. (The Smart Choice Program had provided manufacturers with voluntary nutritional guidelines, under which the children’s cereals with the highest sugar content, for example, were somehow able to claim a health benefit.)

(A close up of the Groppers boxes, after the fold…)

(more…)

October 21, 2009

Art & Politics of Prescription Pill Bottles

Got an email from MoveOn.org that included this tiny photo of wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles. It’s a good example of how packaging can be used as a political symbol. Really, I guess it’s a symbol of health care (or consumption of health care), but in the sense that health care has become a politicized issue, I figure these prescription pill bottles are also a political symbol. There are supposed to be 20,000 of them and each one contains a written message (a message in a bottle) in support of Dawn Smith who has been denied coverage by CIGNA for treatment of her brain tumor. I was surprised not to be able to find other, larger photos of this image. Quantity is powerful and, had it been up to me, I might have wanted to make more of this image. (The video posted yesterday now seems to be doing this.)

On the other hand, maybe 20,000 pill bottles is not really “on point” for their message since Dawn is being denied medical treatment. Mass quantities of pill bottles might tend to suggest the opposite. So many pill bottles implies a prolonged, ongoing treatment of a chronic illness or condition. The pills that you must take for the rest of your life—in order to go on living. And wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles, perhaps, speak more to drug company profits—(rather than to insurance company profits).

Another thing that inevitably comes to mind (when you see huge amounts empty packaging) is consumer waste. I’ve written before about my own negative feelings as a consumer of diabetic supplies. Every time I use up another small canister of test strips (or other diabetic supply that I will presumably be using every day for the foreseeable future)—I feel a certain remorse about the packaging waste. Considering Dawn Smith’s situation, I know that I should count myself lucky that my health insurance continues to pay for my medicine and supplies. And yet glimpsing the cost that my insurance company actually shells out for all these supplies, never fails to give me anxiety about how much longer it might continue to do so. It doesn’t strike me as sustainable.

On left: “Corporate DNA” a helix shaped sculpture by Ron Jones; on right: Rocky Stroup’s “Borrowed Time (13 Years of Pill Poppin’)”

Jean Shin’s “Chemical Balance”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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