packaging as content

January 3, 2012

Hourglass Bottles

On left: Louise Besseling’s “Moment Wine” concept; on right: “Khronos Wine” by Artur Janz, André Cardoso, Lucas Dranka, and William de lima

Many bottles are described as “hourglass shaped” but only a few actually pertain to the archaic time-keeping method.

On left: an hourglass-shaped Absinth bottle; on right: Inez Kochanowicz’s “Water Hour-Glass”

And a few designers have also proposed making hourglasses from discarded bottles…

On left: Danny Seo’s hourglasses made from Method bottles; on right: Recycline’s soda bottle hourglass

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 20, 2011

6 Chairs Made from Packages

1. The “Mad-700-Chair”— by MadC is an M-shaped double sling chair made from empty spray paint cans.

2. The “294 Liter Sitzen” —(Liter Sitzen is German for “I sit”) [see comments below]— is an armchair made from 294 Tetra-Pak cartons by Fabian Jochen Kanzler & Steve Michaelis.

3. The “Lucky Chair” is Roeland Otten’s armchair made from 400 empty packs of Lucky Stripe cigarettes.

4. The “Jar Chair” is made from 96 baby food jars by Johnny Swing.

5. A chair made from glass bottles, but I can’t tell you who made it.

6. The “SIE43 Chair” is made by Pawel Grunert from PET bottles.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 17, 2011

3 More Accordion Packs

In August we looked at some accordion-like packages that featured “bellows” mechanisms that allowed them to expand and contract. More examples have been popping up recently…

1. Nick Seville’s “Shaker Straws” duplicate the effect of a bendable straw. His solution to an assignment about packaging-as-added-value:

“…the brief was to repackage a pound shop item to make it worth double the price. This was achieved by creating a product that stood out on the shelves and made it more interactive for the customer to get a feel for the product.”

Consumers might regard it as a cynical ploy —a package designed to double the price of an item— but it does serve as an important reminder that an elaborate package will surely increase the retail price of a product.

2. Éva Valicsek’s “egg box” uses an accordion-like structure for egg packaging. Here the structure mainly serves to provide stabililty for the eggs, but the flexibility of the bellows structure allows the eggs to be easily inserted or removed from the carton.

Her labeling scheme also includes the barcode as a graphic design element —(similar to a CD package we looked at in 2009).

3. Directions Marketing’s “Tritainer” dog food concept (Grand Prize Winner in “Project 2020: The Consumer Experience”) makes compression a key feature:

“Accordion-type compression reduces container height as product is dispensed, and when empty, the container eventually folds flat for easy recyclability.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 8, 2011

Cigarettes & Cat Food

“Some people with NSRED [nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder] have even been known to eat cigarettes and cat food.”

TheStressOfLife.com

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The Broward Sheriff’s Office said Thursday it was looking for two men suspected of burglarizing more than a dozen vehicles in Parkland.

Deputies said the men are suspected of breaking into a man’s Cadillac in Parkland on July 1 and stealing a wrist watch and a credit card. The suspects then went on a shopping spree at a CVS pharmacy in Boca Raton, buying cat food and cigarettes, authorities said.

Sun Sentinel, 2007

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“He draped a black sheet over the picture window in his bedroom and did not answer the phone. He went out only to buy cigarettes and cat food, wearing a black sweatshirt, the hood pulled down over his eyes.”

Mental Health: The Profession Tests Its Limits
By Erica Goode and Emily Eakin
NY Times, September 11, 2002

For people in a certain demographic group we’ll call “cat-loving smokers,” these two items —cigarettes & cat food— form their most pared down, irreducible shopping list of basic necessities.

The cigarette packs and cat food cans pictured above, however, are shown together, not because my shopping list has come to that, but because they are each examples of “incomplete package design” — packages that may look a little incomplete by themselves, but are designed to form a larger whole when combined.

1. Cigarettes

These, of course, are the same Winston cigarette packages that we were wondering about yesterday. We now know that these were designed in 1997 by Kevin Flatt as a Senior Designer for Duffy.

The packaging was featured at length in the July 1997 issue of “Caravan” the in-house magazine of R.J.Renolds.

“The new packaging style carries the traditional Winston family fonts and red-white-red color scheme, but takes on a contemporary feel with a wraparound pack.”

via: Tobacco Documents Online

2. Cat Food

Milton Glaser’s extensive redesign for Grand Union (1970s though 1980s) included the cat food box (above, left) in which cropped cat photos on the front of the boxes, combined to form whole cats when displayed in a group. (See inset photo on right from: The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Clients)

“…some fun with partial images that relies upon store workers to line up the boxes correctly.”

A Grand Union, Beth Kleber
October 6, 2010
Container List, Glaser Archives

Grand Union’s canned cat food, also included some fun with partial images. The pet food packaging on right is from the portfolio of Blake Waldman (Paperkut Design) who was a Junior Designer at Milton Glaser, Inc. from 1989-1990.

Waldman also designed a 2002 version of the Winston wrap-around pack called the “Evo flask.” See: Winston debuts ‘flask’ pack

(And apropo of nothing: Yogi Berra on Camel Cigarettes and Puss ’n Boots Cat Food, after the fold…)

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September 1, 2011

2 Lemon Spray Cans

Two lemon-scented air freshener spray cans:

1. Conceptual package design for “True” air fresheners (by Berik Yergaliyev at Good!) relies on a soft rubber spray can cap enabling the user to spray the product as if by squeezing the fruit. (See: Packaging & Plastic Fruit)

Lemon is just one of three proposed scents. (Somehow the ice cream cone seems like the outlier in this envisioned product line… See: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.)

2. Kuumba’s “Clot” brand lemon tea air freshener spray comes in a spray-paint-style can whose graphics reference Krylon spray paint’s overlapping colored circles/balls. (Although real lemons mainly come in yellow.) Here, the colored circle/balls are given fruit skin texture highlights and lemon leaves.

The “Clot” brand, I suppose, alludes to clogging of spray paint nozzles, but it also reminds me of “lemon curd” for some reason.

(via: Ape to Man)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 30, 2011

Real & Imaginary PANTONE Package Design

Seeing Room Copenhagen’s new “Pantone Universe” products at Gift Fair (like the multicolored, Mobius-strip shaped hangers above, left) set me to thinking about all the various and sundry packaged Pantone products—real and imagined. (Poster illustration on right is by Base Design)

Although many graphic designers seem to identify with this brand, it always seemed to me that the market for multicolored PANTONE accessories ought to be a pretty small niche. There would undoubtedly be brand loyalists who would happily eat, sleep & breath the PANTONE logo, but those consumers should be far fewer in numbers, than, say, consumers willing to wear a Coca Cola logo.

Pantone is ubiquitous in graphics departments around the world, the metric by which designers define just the right shade of blue for the Gap's logo (Pantone 655) and the perfect pink for Barbie's (Pantone 820). Pantone chips likewise help Kellogg's enhance a cereal box to stand out on the shelf by using "spot" colors more vibrant than the mixes that emerge from the standard four-color printing press.

Allison Fass, “The Color of Money”
Forbes, 2003

Still, despite a certain backlash tendency, there seems to be no shortage of licensing deals and creative energy expended in this direction.

Personally, I find the PANTONE color system a bit kludgy and cumbersome.

Their solid color matching system requires that printers have a set of 14 different PANTONE approved base color inks, in order to correctly mix all of the admixture hues and tones. To me, this is like some inelegant logarithmic table, compared to the simple and logical algebra of CMYK— with 4 process colors.

For certain colors, however, specially mixed solid color inks will be much brighter than CMYK combinations. Correctly specifying those “spot” colors has become increasingly important for retail consumer packaging and for that PANTONE has no competition.

Real and imaginary PANTONE products are generally much more effective when displayed in a multicolored group. (See: Rainbow Array Packaging) Although PANTONE cannot trademark the idea of a color assortment, in the minds of many designers, color = PANTONE.

Graphically, these package designs are usually minimal, based as they are on the layout of a tiny color chip swatch with PANTONE’s Helvetica logo and identifying code number.

(1,114 examples, after the fold…)

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August 24, 2011

Package Design on Your iPhone

Inexplicable drawn to Zero Gravity’s both at Gift Fair. When I saw some of their package-design iPhone cases, I figured that’s what must have been calling to me. Not all of their phone cases are designed to resemble consumer packaged goods, but enough so that it raises some questions. We’ve seen other cases of devices being made to look like packaging… cameras, radios and, yes, telephones.

But since Apple is unlikely to come out with cross-branded varieties of iPhone, if you are determined to possess a Velveeta iPhone, it falls to 3rd party venders of iPhone accessories to meet your needs.

Of course, there are also other package-related iPhone cases with different degrees of DIY.

Joanna Behar was experimenting with a candy-branded iPhone—(candy wrappers placed underneath a transparent iPhone case)…

In both of these examples—Zero Gravity’s faux-packaging and Johanna Behar’s DIY candy branding—the glossy plastic surface belies any sincere intention to fool the eye. These are still coveted hi-tech gadgets—with a glossy veneer of ironic low-brow branding.

Another DIY example: “Randomly Ross” has a Flickr Photostream about making iPhone cases from juice boxes and also offers them for sale on ArtBoxe.

Here’s a case in which the packaging cover serves a more truly undercover role:

“I was trying to find a material to make a case for electronic devices that would be durable, but not attract attention. Truth be told, the thing that first attracted me to juice-boxes is that they are ubiquitous and uninteresting. If someone looks into your purse and sees a book, some keys and a juice box, they aren't going to take the juice box. What if they see a brand new iPhone?”

In titling this post, it struck me how “Package Design on Your iPhone” could be interpreted two ways: as a covering to put on your iPhone and as an activity to do on your iPhone. Then I wondered, is there an app for that?

And I’m not the first pose the question. (See: Richard Shear’s Free iPhone package design app)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 10, 2011

Holding on by a Fingernail:
13 Nail Polish Package Design Patents

After yesterday’s lengthy piece about Dura-Gloss and Cutex package designs you might have thought there wasn’t much left to say about nail polish caps with simulated fingernails. It turns out, we hadn’t even scratched the surface.

There were quite a few other inventors and package designers (besides Edwin T. Reynolds & Donald Deskey) who, in trying to solve the problem of how best to merchanidise nail polish in assorted colors, had thought of fingernails.

A collection of patented bottles and caps follows. All feature simulated fingernails, mostly as a color identifier and, in some cases, as a way of “trying on” a color by slipping a finger underneath a fake fingernail.

(13 patents, after the fold…)

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July 7, 2011

Donald Deskey’s Odorono Jar

Celebrated industrial designer, Donald Deskey is well-known for package design of iconic brands below. Perhaps less well-known, is his structural design of the “Odo-Ro-No” Cream Deodorant jar for Northam Warren Corporation.

Deskey packaging from the exhibit, “Creative Conscious: The Unconstrained Mind of Donald Deskey” (Photo via: Gilmore Branding)

Based on advertising images, Deskey’s art deco jar was in use during the 1940s. Haven’t been able to find any photos online of an actual surviving jar of this type.

The embossed lid was apparently discontinued sometime in the 1950s in favor of a plain flat version. (as with the pink one above)

Don’t know whether Deskey had anything to do with Odorono’s graphic design.

(Odorono’s trademark papers, after the fold…)

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June 16, 2011

Uncapped Landfill Bottle #3

Third bottle up is barnacle-covered with vertical, corduroy-like ridges. This bottle turns out to have once contained a Marcel Rochas men’s fragrance called, Moustache. Launched in 1948–49, the product is still available, but comes in a different shaped bottle with a sans-serif logotype. (During the 1950s the “Moustache” logotype was, itself, mustachioed.)

Sometimes these bottles were sold in boxed sets…

Sometimes these bottles included atomizer bulbs…

In addition to a “citrusy opening” note, the Moustache scent is said to also include “the urinous aroma of animalic notes that recalls horses’ sweat.” (Which is fitting, considering that I found my bottle in Dead Horse Bay—final resting place for so many 19th Century work horses.)

Moustache was clearly intended as a mens product, but like Irish Spring and riding horses, some women like it too…

After the citrusy opening, the characteristic faintly floral and hay-ish powdery heart slowly gives way to the funk of the base notes with their sweaty, urinous and pungent leather impression which lingers quietly, intimately for a long time. Despite it being, marketed as a masculine scent, women who find citrusy or "hazy" suede compositions to their taste should definitely give it a try.

Rochas Moustache: fragrance review & history
Perfume Shrine, september 7, 2009

I thought there might have been a design patent for this bottle, but if there was ever an American one registered, I could not find it.

(Although I did find one design patent by Marcel Rochas for something else entirely, after the fold…)

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May 18, 2011

Interlocking Bottles

Two similar designs for interlocking bottles:

On left: Karim Rashid’s 2003 “Pour Hommes 2 in 1” for Issey Miyake (Men).

On right: Joy Lin’s 2011 envisioned redesign for a Hustler lubricant set.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 16, 2011

Gumball Cube Pack

Seeing projects like Sophie Valentine’s “Capitalism vs. Socialism” and Regina Rebele’s 2008 “Type-Cube” made me wonder if there was a practicable way that this type of “magic folding cube” could be designed as a box to actually contain something.

Ideally, I would have liked it best if the whole thing—all 8 boxes with tucks & glue flaps—could have been folded from a single die-cut shape. That doesn’t appear to be possible, although it was easy enough to get it down to just 4 pieces which must then be hinged together.

But what sort of product should such a package contain? Gumballs, I decided. Stupid, I guess, to envision such an elaborate package for such an inexpensive product, but demographically appropriate as a candy pack for kids. Like something that Topps might have considered doing in the 1970s. And as our video clearly shows, these gumballs really needed to be contained.

Anyway, this is just Gumball Cube-Pack Mach 1. There are some further structural improvements I have in mind to try next. (If you’re listening, Topps, please give us call. We’d love to hook you up.)

(Some still photos, after the fold…)

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April 21, 2011

Cereal Cups: Then & Now

Shredded Wheat cereal cups. Two kinds…

Then:
Henry D. Perky, the inventor of Shredded Wheat, also designed an edible “cereal cup.” His 1895 patent is vague about what it was meant to actually contain, but I’m guessing something other-than-cereal.

Now:
Now when we say “cereal cup” we mean plastic cups containing a single serving of cereal. Although these packages are too small to hold Perky’s original, full-size shredded wheat biscuits, they can and do accommodate Mini-Wheats. (See: KFoodService EU Pack, Cereal to Go and I Am Breakfast)

(Another “cereal cup” patent, after the fold…)

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February 24, 2011

Cross-Category Yogurt-Wristwatch Packaging

Nooka & Karim Rashid’s collaborative wristwatch called “Yogurt” (above) comes packaged in a cross-category food-pack. Not the first wristwatch packaged like food. Another brightly-colored silicone watch that we looked at in 2009 was the Too Late wristwatch, which came packaged in a small jar. (on right)

As with many cross-category packages, the conceptual connection between this wristwatch and creamy yogurt is pretty tenuous.

Their press release talks about: the synergies of “democratic design” and “universal language”—but I’m not sure how that leads to the idea of yogurt, the food. (Is it about “culture”?) Anyway, the Yogurt’s color choices are expressed as fruit-flavors à la early iMacs.

(Via: Lovely Package)

Launch video below:

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 16, 2010

Packaging & Orthographic Graphic Design

I used to think of orthographic projection strictly as drafting technique: those technical drawings, by which any 3-dimensional object could be described in 3–6 views.

In recent years, however, I’ve noticed it turning up as a packaging scheme (see: Mac G5 box, on right) and it does make a certain sense as a way of clearly indicating what’s in the box.

In packaging, as in mechanical drawing, 3 views are usually sufficient to describe most objects. In Art Lebedev’s Paliha-750 telephone carton, however, he has chosen to feature all six, “You can look at it from all sides, while it’s still inside the box.”

Having the outside of a box so closely correspond with the product it contains, makes the packaging function almost as a proxy. Holding the box, the consumer is, in effect, holding a trompe l’oeil product replica. Each panel serves as a diagram of what’s just below the surface. Almost as if the box was invisible and you were seeing right though it. In situations where an actual die window is not feasible, it’s a pretty neat trick.

Above, Marc Brownlow’s automotive light bulb pack:

Packaging system for a specialty aftermarket automotive company. The package uses orthographic “x-ray” views of the bulbs in lieu of clear “windows” to minimize cost.

Another light bulb packaging project, this one by Oliver Meier, also uses orthographic projection. (via: Packaging of The World)

David Graas’s “Not a Box” package clearly shows an orthographic projection of a hanging light with a round shade, but the joke here is that the cube-shaped box is itself the shade and the light is emitted through the misleading lines of the diagram.

The Heliotropium bottle by CPDS is a similar bait and switch. The box shows orthographic projections of a traditional ornate perfume bottle, but inside the box, the bottle is actually box-shaped. (via: the Dieline)

Internationally it was decided to “hide” a bottle. A bottle is in a bottle. The new hides in the previous. The bottle is a box, the box is a bottle. On each side of the box the bottle’s image, the image of it’s each side is placed. The box is designed in such a way when it opens, the drawn bottle opens too. And inside… inside there is other bottle, the real one.

(Some other examples, we’ve featured before, after the fold…)

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December 10, 2010

Can-Gun

Following the Krylon-spray-paint-can & guns thread, I discovered the existence of a package-related product I hadn’t known about: the original “can-gun.” A ergonomic trigger attachment designed to make spray painting less taxing for the index finger.

Originally invented by Paul Hutchinson & Alan Serginson and assigned to Can-Gun Limited. Licensed to various companies, including Krylon. Generally comes packaged on a hook-rack card. Also comes in black.

(See 1st page of patent, after the fold…)

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November 5, 2010

Robert Loughlin’s Brutish Re-Branding

Some package-related artworks by Robert Loughlin. Prolific and single-minded, Loughlin has been painting “the brute” —(his signature squared-jawed smoking man)— on innumerable objects and surfaces since the early 1980s.¹ That some of these objects would be packages, only stands to reason. In tagging them with his own de facto logo, Loughlin² has, in effect re-branded them:

The vintage Mobil Oil can, the Brillo Box³, the perfume bottle picture—(I’m guessing that’s a magazine ad, rather than an actual bottle?)— Kodak Carousel Slide Tray boxes, a record label, a Sears Blanket insert card…

In recent years, Loughlin’s cartoonish, hyper-masculine, smoking “brute” has been featured in The New York Times, Apartment Therapy, Design Boom, etc. While most cite partner, Gary Carlson and his muse and inspiration for “the brute” motif, another important influence may be Leo Burnett’s “Marlboro Man” as the magazine clipping below (from Loughlin’s photo web site) seems to suggest.

Filters at the time were described by Leo Burnett as “sissy”. Real men didn’t smoke filter tipped cigarettes. … Marlboro sold masculinity in 1954 by being the first brand to use “real men” versus the prior models. And what men! They showed football players, cowboys, airplane pilots, and sailors. These were tough, real men… The ads were not just masculine, but were single-mindedly masculine They portrayed manly, rugged men doing manly, rugged jobs.

From Tobacco Documents Online: page 1 of “The Marlboro Success Story,”
a 1985 marketing report made available online as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement

(What is the deal with the guns and the Marlboro pack above? Are the guns little? Or is it an oversized cigarette pack? I don’t know.) The machine gun on the left, is a vintage Tru-matic brand toy machine gun, painted and signed by the artist.

There is also Luke Joerger's film Pickers and Grinners which documents Loughlin’s prowess as a preeminent NY antique picker…

(See a clip of this movie—that features celebrity gossip & packaging—after the fold…)

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