packaging as content

December 12, 2011

Laundry Label Bottles

A bit of trompe l’oeil, cross-category package design…

Stocks Taylor Benson’s shrink sleeve bottle labels for Morrisons laundry liquids (on left) emulate the standard “care instructions” woven label for garments (on right). Winner of a 2011 Pentaward.

(See also: Trompe l’Oeil Price Tags)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 16, 2011

2 More Trapezoidal Boxes

Did a round-up of trapezoidal boxes a while back. Here are two more that I thought looked good together. They’re not new.

The one on the left is Milner Gray’s modern/classic package design for a 1950s Pyrex gift set (No.3a). I like how the handle (and the dark color) make this carton look like a hefty, 1-ton weight. (via: BurningSettlersCabin)

The one on the right is a flat, trapezoid-shaped box for the ARC6 flashlight. (Now discontinued.)

Pairing them up together, I thought the ARC’s embossed “burst” logo sort of related to the Pyrex crown logo. And it also looks, in this photo, as if the ARC6 box had a silver-grey neutral color, matching the black & white Pyrex packaging photo. That, I think, is a misperception based on a skillfully lighted “hero shot.” The ARC6 flashlight box seems to have actually been white. (via: CPF Reviews)

(Another photo, after the fold…)

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November 15, 2011

Pensioners and Packaged Foods: Best Before …

“My wife’s 90-year-old grandmother — having lived through World War II — doesn’t believe in “best before” dates. It made eating at her house rather exciting. Sadly, she had to move to a home and clearing out her larder was as thrilling as being offered a snack. All the products here — going back decades — were, I believe, intended to be eaten.

James Kendall, “Best Before”

James Kendall’s photos of vintage (but still viable?) packaged foods, I can relate to on a personal level…

My late grandmother had a similar disinclination to discard foodstuffs. An elderly box of Nesselroad Pudding in her cupboard was an ongoing joke with my brothers and me.

Of course, in these days of reality television, all types of hoarding are undergoing a closer social scrutiny. Looking at my grandmother’s situation in retrospect, I now regret the smug superiority that we felt towards her housekeeping and her kitchen.

That certainty of ours — that my grandmother was crazy to think that anyone in their right mind would consider eating her box of Nesselroad pudding — was just a part of our being young and newly competent.

“Best before…” certainly does not constitute a drop dead expiration date. It’s more like a serving suggestion, really.

Best before or best by dates appear on a wide range of frozen, dried, tinned and other foods. These dates are only advisory and refer to the quality of the product, in contrast with use by dates, which indicate that the product is no longer safe to consume after the specified date. In spite of this, about a third of food bought is thrown away while still edible.

Wikipedia’s entry on Shelf Life

It’s easy to see why older people might want to push the envelope in this regard. It might even be an inescapable geriatric rule — that as we get older, the food from our kitchen will become increasingly less appetizing to our children. Whether this will be due to failing eyesight, financial hardship or simply our own declining standards of “freshness” is hard to say. Maybe all of the above.

Even if our children become freegans, their food will certainly be fresher than the food in these photos. But so what? Assuming the meal worms and pantry moths have not beaten you to that box of pudding mix: just dust off the top and you’re good to go.

If we can set aside our personal judgments about the “freshness” of packaged products, the importance of packaging in the lives of pensioners becomes more obvious…

(Why packaged food is preferable to home-cooked, after the fold…)

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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

September 29, 2011

Modular Wine Bottle Desk Lamp

“Built-in interlocking joints and partially biodegradable materials… The reusable carrying case transforms into an energy-efficient LED desk lamp, using your empty wine bottle as a stand.”

from Miniwiz

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 19, 2011

Polyhedral Light Bulb Packaging
(Structural Package Design Patent from 1970)

Bryon L. Lessar’s octahedral “Package for Light Bulbs” was patented in 1972.

(First page of Lessar’s patent appears, 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 3, 2011

The Incomplete Package Revisted

This is a follow-up to an earlier article about packaging designed with photos, graphics or typography wrapping around the corners. Here’s another batch of cartons with that kind of wrap-around imagery.

Look at one of these boxes from one side and you see only part of the picture. Viewed from a corner angle, the picture is complete and cubistically 3-dimensional.

Boxes designed using this technique also open up interesting display possibilities, since they can be stacked in ways that will complete the incomplete side pictures.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 24, 2011

Martha Stewart & Lifebuoy Soap

Ever since we found a video of the Martha Stewart Tareyton Cigarettes commercial, we’ve been on the lookout for her 1956 Lifebuoy Soap commercial. Yesterday, it suddenly appeared on the Advertising Age web site. Unfortunately for us, that video was not the embeddable type, so last night I made this crude silent-movie version below…

Then this morning I found this embeddable version (via Professor Barnhardt’s Journal). It has a slightly reduced aspect ratio, but at least it’s a “talkie”…

Stewart mentioned her role in this commerical on Larry King Live in 2003…

STEWART: I remember making some commercials. I did a Lifebuoy soap commercial.

KING: You did?

STEWART: Well, when I was like 15.

KING: Lifebuoy, Lifebuoy.

STEWART: I played a young married. Can you imagine? As I say, I was 15-years-old.

CNN transcript of “Interview with Martha Stewart, Martha Kostyra”
Larry King Live, December 22, 2003

After seeing it again at an event last week Stewart commented, “I loved seeing that commercial because who smelled? — Did he smell or did I smell? It was done on Shelter Island. … I took off two days from school, I had a chaperone.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 22, 2011

Shoe Box : Tissue Box

More orthographically-projected “shoe boxes” reminiscent of the ones we showed last December, but these boxes (designed by groovisions in 2006 for Oji Nepia) are meant to be both shoe box and tissue box. The idea being that once the shoes are removed the box may be saved to dispense tissues.

Nice business on the “soles” of these boxes where there appears to be evidence of something having been stepped in. Which is odd to see on the proxy box for your brand new shoes, but does create a clear spot on the treads for some legible product information.

(Via: Packaging of the World)

(Another box and second thoughts, after the fold…)

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May 25, 2011

Bottle in a Pitcher

Further historic evidence that packaging at the table was once considered bad manners:

“…a fluid container or pitcher within which may be placed and securely held a milk or cream bottle of standard shape and size, so as to permit… the fluid poured therefrom, without such bottle being exposed to view.

It will be understood that such milk bottles are crude and would not present an attractive appearance upon the table, whereas such a bottle… might readily be placed within the container I provide with ease and convenience and with an approach to a more agreeable appearance.”

Aurthur J. Herschmann
Fluid-Container
Patented in 1920

(See also: Branding in your home)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 4, 2011

Product Placement at Bin Laden’s Compound

The television set that I mostly watched in 2001, was one with an antenna (rather than a cable) that we had in our kitchen. After September 11, the only network our kitchen TV could pick up was ABC. (Apparently the competing stations relied on transmitters atop one of the twin towers.)

It was during that time that I got into the habit of watching ABC news.

This week, when I first saw the helmet-cam video of Bin Laden’s bedroom, it struck me that there were shots of packaging and clutter that constituted a problematic sort of product placement for manufacturers. Would Vaseline really want its customers to know they were using the same brand of petroleum jelly as Osama Bin Laden?

Unfortunately, I seem to have been scooped by Diane Sawyer and Nick Schifrin. Last night ABC took us on a frame-by-frame packaging reconnaissance through the video, in a piece entitled, “Osama Bin Laden Dead: Osama’s Medicine Cabinet.”

This report even included 3D packages (identified by product type, rather than brand name) against a hi-tech grid with cross-hair sights. Similar to the graphics that Sarah Palin was criticized for, only here the targets are packages, rather than political opponents. In Bin Laden’s compound, of course, the shooting had already occurred and packages were not the target. (Although shooting at packaging is a traditional form of target practice.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

April 29, 2011

Anthropomorphic Aerosol Can

If you’re searching for something relatively obscure on Google, you sometimes run up against this smug, algorithmic presumption that you must have misspelled it.

Last week, while researching “Muffets” (the round shredded wheat), Google kept insisting that it was surely Muppets that I was looking for. To the point where I was forced to type: muffets -muppets (Muffets, not Muppets, damnit!)

But along the way Google showed me something that I was grateful to see: a 1967 commercial for Linit Fabric Finish spray, featuring an anthropomorphic aerosol can with the familiar Jim Henson/Kermit-the-Frog voice.

Predating Sesame Street’s debut by several years, the spray-can puppet was made by Don Sahlin and the “fair damsel” at the ironing board was played by Jenny O'Hara.

(Sir Linit photo & Henson’s “Linit Man” character sketch, after the fold…)

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March 24, 2011

Cake & Kleenex Boxes

Top left photo: from TheCraftyBuffet; top right from: TheGirlyGirlCooks

We’ve seen these prism-shaped Kleenex boxes before. Once as sliced fruit (“Perfect Slice of Summer”); once as felted tissue box covers for Christmas.

Recently they used the wedge-shaped boxes to represent 3 slices of cake and one slice of cherry pie (“Divine Desserts”). Here, as with the fruit slice boxes, the Illustrations were done by Hiroko Sanders whose “attention to detail in cake texture and decoration,” we are told, “came from hours of research in bakeries and her own kitchen.”

These boxes may be the perfect shape to represent a slice of cake, but as tissue packaging, the connection seems more than a little tenuous. (In contrast, say, to Martha Stewart’s cake-shaped cake-mix boxes.)

And yet… there may be something at work here that we don’t fully understand.

Remember last year when we looked at package-shaped cakes? Well, tissue boxes are among those consumer packaged goods that also exist in cake-form. There are, in fact, many people who celebrate Birthdays and other holidays with cakes shaped like Kleenex boxes.

Some prefer their Kleenex cakes with branding intact. (As the two cakes on the right will attest… upper cake, from CakeCentral.com; lower cake, from CelebratewithaCake.com)

Others want their cake to be of the debranded, domestically-enhanced type. For those people, there are tissue box cakes, frosted not with logos, but with edible tissue box cozies. (See: Kleenex Christmas Packs)

from CakeCentral.com

Which now brings us to Twinkie Chan who crochets tissue box cozies (example on left) that resemble pieces of cake.

What sort of cake would she prefer? Her birthday cake (made by Debbie Does Cakes) is what you see on the right. As she explains it in her 2009 blog entry…

“It’s a cake modeled after my Layer Cake Tissue Cozy….so it’s a real cake that’s supposed to look like a fake cake.”

Put another way: it’s a cake disguised to look like a tissue box wearing a crocheted cake disguise.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 22, 2011

Package Design Conveyor Belt

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Now open for business: our new web site features this interactive, conveyor belt style shelf showing Beach Packaging Design’s portfoilio. (Mouse over at either end to see more)

On the actual web site the small packages serve as the menu for selecting larger images. (Here they just convey themselves back & forth for your amusement.)

If you‘re in the market for some package design, please stop by.

Feel free to browse, but be careful. (You break it—you buy it!)

February 21, 2011

Flat Bulb Box

From 2008: Joonhyun Kim’s “Flat Bulb”

As the era of incandescent light seems to be waning, Joonhyun Kim offers one last idea for an object that has long served as a symbol for ideas:

“I designed bulbs which would be disappeared that I felt like last time to design.”

Using the orthographic projection technique, the box shows an actual size diagram of its contents, but only from one familiar-looking angle. In another context—(a thicker, less flat box)—this diagram might seem deceptive, but the flatness of the box, combined with the product name help gets the idea across in a flash.

(Photos of Joonhyun Kim with his prototype, after the fold…)

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