packaging as content

January 31, 2012

Liberty Bell Jars

Nash’s Prepared Mustard was sold in a number of different figural glass jars —(that could often be reused as children’s coin banks)— and in the late 1940s or early 1950s one of these jars was “Liberty Bell” shaped. (Jar on left from eBay $39.99; jar on right from eBid $19.99)

It’s customary for sellers of antique glassware to stipulate to any chips or cracks, but, with Liberty Bell jars, it’s interesting to see whether the seller will notice the paradox of a glass reproduction of the famously cracked Liberty Bell. Some don’t seem to notice it:

“Shape of liberty bell jar is in very good condition. No chips, no cracks.”

Others do:

“imitation” crack that you would find on the real Liberty Bell

_______________________________________________________________

“The jar has no chips or cracks except the crack that is suppose to be on the liberty bell.”

“Liberty Bell Bottle Bank” from Anderson Militia, $25

Kraft also came out with a mustard in this type of jar and later, in 1976, Liberty Bell jars enjoyed a brief Bicentennial renaissance as containers for maraschino cherries, Spanish olives and probably other patriotic foods, as well.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 27, 2012

The Old Package Design Feed Bag

If you read this blog by way of email subscription or RSS feed, you may have wondered why box vox suddenly stopped posting this past week. The fact is, I’ve had my hands full trying to migrate this blog from TypePad to a WordPress site hosted on our own BeachPackagingDesign site. There were actually three posts made since the switch, but it only dawned on me yesterday that feed subscribers were being orphaned by the move. Now that I’ve updated the RSS feed, I’m hoping everyone who opted in will continue receiving our ultra-significant package design missives.

Feed Bags: 3 kinds

1. Feed bags for horses (sold for $88.13 at Cowan Auctions)

2. Bag packaging for animal feed (for sale for $14 from shepshaberdashery’s Etsy Store)

3. Candy “feeding bags” from a vintage ad in a 1911 issue of International Confectioner, sold for only 1¢ each (via: The Candy Professor)

January 26, 2012

Package Design & Wolverine Toy Refrigerator Doors

Left: photo from The T-Cozy’s Flickr Photostream; on right photo from The House of Oliver’s Etsy store ($29)

We’ve shown similar toys with trompe l’oeil name brand packages printed on them —(toy shopping carts, miniature dollhouse packages, etc.)— but I recently got a glimpse inside a Wolverine brand toy fridge.

Originally, toys like the pink refrigerator on the right (with “a full larder reproduced on door insides”) retailed for only $2.98, but as a collectible the price is now higher. (Wolverine advertising photo via: The People History)

I’ve lost track of some of these photo sources, but 2nd row, left: from Live Auctioneers; on right: from MarkandBlyth’s Flickr Photostream; 3rd row, left: from The T-Cozy; on right: from RainbowMermaid’s Flickr Photostream; 4th row, left from Schaufensterbabe; on right: from eBay Auction ($19) bottom row, right: pink fridge from TwirlswithPearls’ Etsy Store

With the doors of the refrigerators permanently stocked with food packaging, we wondered what sort of packaging the toys, themselves came in.

(Asked and answered after the fold…)

(more…)

January 23, 2012

Jonna Pedersen’s Package Sculptures

Last August we featured some of Jonna Pedersen’s paintings of Danish packaging.

Her contribution to the upcoming, Global Village 2012 show in Alkmaar, Holland, includes two over-sized package sculptures: a Maggi Bouillon box (above) and the margarine package on right.

–Randy Ludacer

January 12, 2012

Purple Cow Packaging

Vintage Holloway’s Purple Cow candy wrapper from Jason LieBig’s Flickr Photostream; William’s Purple Cow Lager can from The Beer Can Guide; Milka Chocolate’s purple cow shaped folding carton (via: Packaging of the World); a vintage “purple cow” fruit label for Washington apples for sale on eBay ($250)

Based on an 1895 poem by Gelett Burgess, a “purple cow” generally meant something “out of the ordinary” or something you don’t see every day. As depicted in these vintage packages, each with its whimsical cow illustration, the concept was fine.

I’m not so accepting of the new over-arching definition of “purple cow” as something remarkably innovative, as set forth in Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Because of this book, some people are now calling any ground-breaking, category disrupting product a “purple cow.”

For some reason, I find this new meaning a loathsome thing. To me, the name “purple cow” diminishes the hard work of innovation, making it sound like something merely capricous.

I doubt Steve Jobs would ever have given one of Apple’s products as insipid a name as “purple cow” and yet all over the place there are people now saying that the iPad and the iPhone are “purple cows.”

You need look no further than the scapbooking craft company The Purple Cows to understand the uncool connotations that this name carries.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 30, 2011

Camouflage Package Design Continued

Lest anyone imagine that camouflage patterns were confined only to beverage packaging, here are some recent examples of camouflage package design, in general.

Because of its star logo, Amour Star seems ready-made for a patriotic camouflage treatment, although it’s debatable how American a “Vienna Sausage” can ever be. (Designed by Bob Oliva)

Jiffy Pop, too, has undergone camouflage treatment. (Via: Lester Of Puppets’s Flickr Photostream)

“Powderflage” powder concealer comes in a camouflage canister. (Note how its camo pattern is made of butterflies.)

Srixon’s camouflaged USO golf balls pack, we’ve mentioned before.

Yoder’s canned bacon comes in a camouflage patterned can.

“A Bathing Ape” (aka: BAPE) has for a while featured camouflage patterns in its branding.

And Huggie’s diapers have also supported our troops through camouflage patterning.

Also: camouflage candy…

and camouflage peanuts, for some reason.

(and one more example, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 20, 2011

Clown Jars

Clown time continues with some clown-related jars from Etsy: a handmade clown cookie jar (yours, for $64.00) and “12 Vintage Clown Cupcake Toppers in Vintage Jar” (sold).

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 19, 2011

Mr. Sprinkles Package Design Makeover

An exception to the general waning of CPG clown packaging:

“Mr. Sprinkles,” (whose weeble-like bottle won the 2009 “Gold” award from the National Association of Container Distributors) has recently been redesigned.

Originally the bottle was more closely akin to inflatable punching bag clowns (see inset right) but, while the overall effect of the new package design is less of a fully-embodied, anthropomorphic pack, the new clown illustration is now more identifiable and less threatening. The product still shows through the window into the clown’s sprinkle-filled belly.

The illustration style looks familiar. (Maybe someone knows whose work this is?)

Photo above left comes from the orginal “Mr. Spinkles” trademark filing. The photo above right is from Bakerella.

(See also: Gömböc Bottle)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 16, 2011

Clown Cereal

Clown cereal boxes (Kellogg’s, General Mills & Post) were, I think, all from Dan Goodsell’s Flickr Photostream

My early childhood was spent in Sarasota, Florida, home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

While clowns have been culturally waning for some time now, in those days, there was a show called “Circus Boy” on television (starring a young Micky Dolenz who grew up to become the Monkee‘s drummer) and there were lots of circus-themed packages at the grocery store. Not yet scary, clowns were still considered a good way to market children’s cereals.

Why the sudden interest in clowns, you ask?

(Asked and answered, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 14, 2011

Ron English: Popaganda Shopdropping

Ron English is the artist who created the zipper/banana album cover mash-up that we wrote about last January.

More recently he’s been doing some cereal box package design (i.e.: art) which he’s been shopdropping into supermarkets. These “popaganda” food repacks are subversive in the same dumb sort of way that Wacky Packages were: creating momentary consumer confusion and adding a satiric, negative spin to trademarked food brands.

Some commentators have taken the cereal series as nutritional agitprop in opposition of childhood obesity. I’m not sure that English’s agenda is so politically correct, but I could be wrong.

The fun part of shopdropping, however, is when consumers puzzle over the aberrant branding messages and, in some cases, blithely purchase them.

Part of the reason I prefer not think that English’s messaging is sincerely literal is the “Sugar Diabetic Bear” below, which in my (diabetic) view is amusing, but not entirly accurate. Yes, Type 2 diabetes can be brought on by obesity, but what about Type 1 diabetes? Eating sugar certainly didn’t cause my diabetes. (See: Diabetes Myths)

(One more thing about Ron English and diabetes, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 8, 2011

Wooden Packaging

Top row: Anicka Yi and Maggie Peng’s cedar-encased fragrance bottles; 2nd row, left: Andrée Rouette’s ABCD veneer-covered maple syrup cans (via Packaging UQAM); 2nd row, right: Espen Hansen’s veneer-covered AO Vinje gin box; 3rd row, left: Society27’s wooden shoebox; 3rd row, right & below: Léo Breton-Allaire’s spruce gum chewing gum concept (via: Packaging UQAM); 4th row left & below right: Maude Bussières’s detachable wooden pencils concept (via Packaging UQAM); 5th row, left: Debowa oak-encased vodka bottles; bottom row: Gerlinde Gruber’s wooden, puzzle-like jewelry box

Packages made of wood (See also: Wood Framed Bottles)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 5, 2011

Coca Cola’s Dripping Negative Space

On left: “liquidated” Coca Cola logo by Zevs; center: a recently discontinued Coke can; on right: Zoo’s package design for Rubén Álvarez yogurt.

The first time I saw the seasonal Coca Cola can above was from a distance of about 3 yards (2.75 m). I was in the back of the supermarket by the meat cases when I noticed some cans with what appeared to be dripping white frosting (or melting glacial ice?) on display in a Coca Cola end cap.

I left my shopping cart where it was and crossed over for a closer look. Not drips at all, but just the negative space behind some polar bears on a silver ridge.

Maybe I’m predisposed to seeing dripping graphics everywhere, but, even if this optical illusion is unintentional, a dripping white package does seem in keeping with Coca Cola’s frosty, cold gestalt. And, to my eyes, the white ink comes to the foreground and the silver metal of the can is the more natural background.

None of this matters much in the face of another negative controversy. The package design was intended to be part of Coke’s “cause marketing” effort to protect the polar bear, but this message is being overshadowed by the problem of diabetic consumer confusion.

“I purchased three six-packs because I thought they were diet,” Gail O’Donnell of Danvers, Massachusetts, told ABC News .

“I drank one and wondered why it tasted so good. I didn’t look at the can. … I am a diabetic and can only drink diet sodas. They need to make it so it is not confused.”

Coke and Diet Coke Cans Should Be Polar Opposites, Buyers Say

Coca Cola has therefore discontinued production of the white can, switching back to last year’s red version. So diabetics (like me) won’t get confused and drink regular, caloric Coke by mistake, screwing up their blood sugar.

Come to think of it, the red can looks a little like dripping blood.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 1, 2011

The Entenmann’s Box as Metaphor

The Entenmann’s box with the see-through window is sometimes used as a metaphor. Usually this has to do with ideas about tranparency. The Wacky Pack “Antenmann’s” parody sticker (on the left) compared the Entenmann’s see-through window to a window on an ant farm. The shrink-wrapped Entenmann’s box on the right is an advertising promotion: a deck of Entenmann’s box-shaped playing cards. Strange for playing cards to have a see-through window. If you’re playing cards, you generally want the hand you’re dealt to be for your eyes only. (See also: Wacky Packages and Playing Card Packs.)

1. Consumer
A 1996 remembrance by Wendy Wasserstein, about Martha Entenmann’s life is entitled, “She Saw Through Us.” By “us” she means Entenmann’s consumers so the metaphor is about Martha Entenmann’s early insight into our consumer behavior—that we customers were as transparent to her as the “see-through convertible bakery box top” that she invented.

2. Coffin
A character in F. Paul Wilson’s, The Tomb, while eating crumb cake, talks about wanting to be interred in an Entenmann’s box:

I’ve decided that after I’m cremated I want my ashes buried in an Entenmann’s box. Or if I’m not cremated, it should be a white, glass-topped coffin with blue lettering on the side.” He held up the cake box. “Just like this. Either way, I want to be interred on a grassy slope overlooking the Entenmann’s plant in Bay Shore.”

Another example of Entenmann’s box as coffin was found in these comments on a blog post about burying a pet parakeet:

I buried my budgie, Petey, in an empty Entenmann’s box . . . the cellophane window allowed for excellent viewing at the wake that we held for the neighborhood kids.

… Naturally, one would use the Entenmann’s box after consoling oneself with some tasty brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or cinnamon rolls.

3. “Believers” (and non-believers)
A sermon by Harold C. Warlick, Jr. entitled “People See Through Us” uses the same basic metaphor a Wendy Wasserstein—the “transparency” of people. Here, however, it is not about what Martha Entenmann sees in us, but how we look in God’s eyes…

Martha Entenmann invented the see-through cake box. Suddenly all manner of baked goods from pies to doughnuts began to arrive in see-through boxes with a proud blue Entenmann banner stamped on them. This caused those Entenmann baked goods to fill the shelves from New York to Miami.

As soon as the Christian church was organized as an institution, the letters and epistles of Paul and the epistle of James began to hammer home a message people did not want to hear. All believers and congregations are see-through to the world. People see through us. They really do! There is a see-through box top that covers every congregation and every believer.

from Sermons on the Second Readings

Interestingly, the Entenmann’s box also plays a role in Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life…

(The Entenmann’s box as “literature-of-last-resort” after the fold…)

(more…)

November 30, 2011

The Entenmann’s Box and Its Discontents

Some websites credit Martha Entenmann with having invented the “see-through” cake box. Other sites (including Entenmann’s) say it was a collaborative effort with her three sons.

Believing that people were more inclined to buy what they can see, the Entenmann’s brothers, William, Robert and Charles, and mother, Martha, invented the familiar “see-through” cake box for baked goods in 1959.

Entenmann’s Direct

This insight transformed Entenmann’s business:

Quality baked goods used to be sold in white paperboard boxes tied with string, and only someone with X-ray vision knew what the treats within actually looked like. Then in 1959 Martha Entenmann, wife of the son of the Entenmann’s bakery founder, had a brainstorm — people were more apt to buy something if they could actually see it. Working with her sons (who’d joined their mom in the family business after serving in the Korean War), she developed the first cake box with a plastic “window.” The new box allowed the company to display its product on standard supermarket shelves, rather than relying on the limited “under glass” space available in independent bakeries. Instead of taking a number and waiting for a busy salesperson, consumers could browse among all the various “see-through” boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, powdered doughnuts, and crumb cakes…

Metal Floss

Recent changes to their packaging, however, have now irritated some loyal customers…

(The backlash of the discontents, after the fold…)

(more…)

November 29, 2011

Entenmann’s Box Cake

We’ve featured other package-shaped cakes in the past, but the idea of making a cake, shaped like a box of Entenmann’s Chocolate Fudge Cake, rises to higher level. Adding another whole layer of meaning to the humble sheet cake—(the one-story, “ranch house” of cakes)—these two Entenmann’s cakes raise some philisophical questions… Are they artificial Entenmann’s cakes? Are they edible packages containing real cake?

The term “box cake” is sometimes used to describe cake made from a cake mix, but both of the cakes pictured above are professionally-made custom cakes. In both cases, the whole thing is cake, and yet there’s a window through which you can see “the cake.”

The top cake is a birthday cake and its baker (who I think is based in Connecticut) explains it this way:

“customer wanted me to recreate her husband’s favorite food!”

–My Kids Are Killing Me on CakeCentral.com

The lower cake is a “groom’s cake” by Kate Sullivan of NYC-based, Cake Power:

“…for one Entenmann’s-loving groom, [she] constructed a replica of the supermarket-staple fudge cake, in its well known white-and-blue box, out of white chocolate fondant.”

Cake Power

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 28, 2011

Nabisco 12 Pack Cartons

These Nabisco boxes caught my eye at the supermarket for a few reasons…

a. They seem to be trompe l’oeil renditions of wrapped tray packaging—as if we were seeing the inner packs through a layer of Cellophane.

b. As such, they also suggest orthographic packaging, where the contents of a box are projected onto the side panels. I don’t really know how these packets are arranged within, but it appears they are not accurately projected on all sides.

c. Since the package design relies on illustrations of the inner packs to communicate its contents, there is an odd repetition of information when the carton contains only one type of packet. This repetition strikes me as almost Warholian. One box looks like a stack of three. Each box, a microcosm of a stacked supermarket display. The effect is more conventional (less repetitive) when the box contains a variety.

(A few more examples, after the fold…)

(more…)

November 23, 2011

Wonder Bread Shoes: 4 Pairs

As it seems to be “shoe week” here on box vox, I thought I’d go ahead and take a look at some of the footwear that’s been wearing Wonder Bread’s “trade dress” in the last couple of years…

1. An And1 “wear test sample” that was never manufactured for mass consumption.

2. Wonder Bread style Pro Keds. Their tagline: “the best thing since sliced bread.” Photo via: PBNation (See also: Bread and Sneakers)

3. Wonder Bread bags as shoes worn by Moe from The Simpsons in an episode entitled, “the Grift of the Magi.”

4. The Wonder Bread “color way” for polka dot BAPE Stas.

(Moe’s shoe video, more of And1 and another example, after the fold…)

(more…)

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