packaging as content

April 5, 2012

Postmodern Structural Packaging

If “form follows function” is a modernist idea, then using mock functional features as decorative elements is surely “postmodern.” Hence, the little Polar mixed fruit jar’s tiny useless lug handles may suggest old world tradition, but are in no way functional handles.

Similarly postmodern, are the bottles with mock, pitcher-style spouts like the Tropicana orange juice and Coombs Family Farms maple syrup jugs below.

Here, a pointed spout shape may point up the pourability of the bottle’s contents, but it is through the hole in the cap that the pouring actually happens.

I’m thinking there must be other examples.

–Randy Ludacer

March 9, 2012

Beer Can Track Lights

We did a round up of tin can lighting fixtures in September of 2010. These beer can track lights by ZAL Creations are similar.

They seem to have struck a chord with websites catering to the young, hetero, pad-proud, beer-consuming demographic. (See: “Ultimate Man-Cave Lighting System,” Menterests, Gizmodo & DormSlate, et al.)

I like the variety of oddball beer cans, chosen for this photo, but it looks as if you can also arrange to have your illumination emanate from matching containers, if that is your preference. $87 each. (ZAL also created one of the three Pipe Bottle Lamps we featured last week.)

(For more about Heineken “Keg Can” see: PackWorld; for more about the Budweiser “Cabottle” see: BeerCanGuide; for more about the Sapporo Beer Can: see our 2008 post.)

–Randy Ludacer

March 5, 2012

Lenticular Flick

I’ve written a couple times about packages with lenticular labels. A potentially great solution to a common package design problem: “How to demonstrate a difficult-to-explain product transformation without resorting to a sequential series of images?”

And the thing is, without a video of the lenticular package in motion, a sequential series of images is exactly what I usually wind up showing you. (See: the lenticular Changing Lanes wine labels.)

That’s why I insisted on leaving our new (Progressive) salad spinner gift in its box until I had a chance to film it.

–Randy Ludacer

March 1, 2012

Pipe Bottle Lamps

Left: a bedside bottle lamp by ZAL Creations for sale, $185; center: M Jay Harrison’s “Brewery Lamp” for sale, $85; on right: a “Plumbing Fixture Lamp” with mason jar & ball chain pull (for sale, $169 from ClaraBellsCloset)

Another intersection of bottles and plumbing pipes: steam punk pipe/bottle lamps. Similar to Plastered Plumber, only these dispense light, rather than whiskey.

Interesting to conflate the flow of water and the flow of electricity. And not so strange to use a bottle as a lamp, considering that the earliest light-bulb prototype may have been a recycled eau-de-cologne bottle. (See: Göbellamp Bottle)

–Randy Ludacer

February 10, 2012

Getting a Grip on Deskey’s Bottle Design

As promised, the brand identity of yesterday’s mystery bottle is now revealed. At first I thought it might be for a men’s product since there’s something tool-like about its hand-grip shape. Incorrect.

Turns out, it was designed to contain Drene Shampoo. Difficult to figure this out, however, since this brand no longer exists.

Originally, soap and shampoo were very similar products; both containing the same naturally derived surfactants, a type of detergent. Modern shampoo as it is known today was first introduced in the 1930s with Drene, the first shampoo with synthetic surfactants.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Shampoo

Presumably, since Deskey’s patented 1949 bottle design was assigned to Procter & Gamble, it was also he who designed the graphics for the bottle label and the carton that the bottle came in.

Five years later the Drene Shampoo packaging was redesigned again, although the bottle shape remained unchanged. (The photo and the quote below are via Al Q’s Flickr Photostream…)

New Drene carton is a completely new design – by Donald Deskey Associates — due to increasing sales of the shampoo through supermarkets and grocery chains. New design has cosmetic appeal, bold display, and a flexibility of display that permits placing the carton in a horizontal or vertical position. Designer’s second most important contribution (the new carton was the first) was the research and development of printing inks in colors which would meet the specifications set by the client. Ink specifications are very critical and only inks that will withstand product tests, fade tests, and scuff tests, are acceptable. Until recently, chartreuse and purple colors could not be formulated to meet the requirements. Deskey’s third most important contribution was the development of a package design that has been an inspiration to the advertising agency in the preparation of outstanding and revolutionary advertising art work.

from “Industrial Design In America” 1954

Interesting to note this early example of a package being designed to work both horizontally and vertically. Not all product manufacturers care about this idea, but it does gives a store more display options. (See: Lego Fruit Snacks)

(More about Deskey’s Drene and it’s finger grip shape, after the fold…) (more…)

February 9, 2012

2 More Design Patent Bottles by Donald Deskey

In addition to Tuesday’s patents for toothpaste tubes and other patented package designs by Donald Deskey, I recently found design patents for the bottles above.

Similar to the detective work that the bottles from Dead Horse Bay presented, finding a patent for a package design and then finding a photo of the actual retail package can be a difficult job. But somebody’s got to do it.

The 1951 patent drawing on the right was easy. It’s Joy Dishwashing Detergent. The patent drawing on the left from 1948 was much harder. I’ll tell you about that one tomorrow.

(More Joy, after the fold…)

(more…)

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

______________________________________________________

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

______________________________________________________

“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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

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

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