packaging as content

April 14, 2009

Fractal Packs

Winner of a 2007 Pro Carton Special Prize: Absolut Bärbar by Hanna Nylén of the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and Louise Gustafsson, a former student at the Nackademin Upper Secondary School, both from Stockholm.

Self-similarity between packaging and contents.

(Self-similarity between store-display and packaging, after the fold…)

(more…)

February 10, 2009

Fractal Bottle House

Photo of a bottle house in Sultana, CA from Matt (mister Goleta)’s Flickr Photostream

Why fractal? Because, as both a bottle-shaped building and a building made out of bottles, it has “self-similarity.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

April 12, 2008

Droste Effect Packaging

At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals.

This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.

Left: the front panel of Cocao package for which the “Droste effect” is named. Right: An old Royal Baking Powder package which also illustrates the effect.

Since so many products are nearly indistinguishable from their packaging—(a tube of ChapStick, a can of Coke)—I figured that there would be lots of examples. My brief supermarket survey showed me otherwise. It’s quite rare. You can easily find packaging that includes packaging pictures, but it’s almost always a picture of the inner packaging—(the outside of the box shows the packets contained within)—or else it’s a cross-marketing campaign where pictures of other packages in the product line are shown—usually on the back.

(more photos after the jump) 

(more…)

March 22, 2008

Victor Mouse Trap 4-Pack

(First, a little background about me & mice…) When I was a kid I used to keep pet mice. It all started when the garbage man in my neighborhood in Sarasota, Fla. (around 1964) handed me a coffee can with a lid. Inside the can was a live, tame mouse. My mother let me keep him. (Later, in college, I graduated to pet rats, but that’s another story.) I mention my first pet mouse only to acknowledge that I have a continuing affection for rodents and to fully disclose my conflicted feelings about pest control products.

At Home Depot last month I lingered for a quite a while in the pest control section thinking about the Victor® mouse traps, their logo and whether or not I wanted to blog about it. At the time I decided that, as a rodent-lover, I would not go there.

Soon afterwards our good friend and neighbor, Jacqueline had a sudden infestation of mice. This was due to some packages of bird seed and cat food that were stored in the basement, but were not mouse-proof. (Bad animals taking food from the mouths of good animals?) She went to Home Depot and purchased the entire Victor mouse trap product line—doubtless the very same mouse traps whose aesthetic properties I had been ruminating over. It was the coincidence of Jacqueline’s use of Victor mouse traps that has led me to write about this, after all.

(A shocking photo and more to read after the jump…)

(more…)