packaging as content

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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February 18, 2011

Lamp Packaging / Packaging Lamp

1. Lamp Packaging: As a designer of polyhedral lamps, Tom Dixon is no slouch in the area of complex symmetries, but the packaging for his Etch Light (a deltoidal icositetrahedron) is a standard rectangular box.

In fact, the only polyhedral package for a Tom Dixon lamp that I’ve ever seen was the dodecahedron-shaped box for his discontinued “Star Light.”

The rectangluar box for the “Etch Light” was designed by Mind Design:

“We designed a functional packaging range and a series of different patterns for Tom Dixon’s new ‘Etch Light’. The first versions of this self-assembly lamp shades were launched in Milan as part of the Tom Dixon Factory. Respect to the Op-Art masters of the 60’s who designed even more complex graphic patterns without any help of a computer…”

2. Packaging Lamp: While the economic constraints of carton construction & shipping may have led Dixon away from polyhedral packaging for his own products, he has recently gone in the other direction and made polyhedral lamps from rectangular boxes.

His “Comet Lamp” (above right) was made from reconstructed Veuve Clicquot “DesignBoxes” as part of their “Out of The Box” promotion:

“I created the Comet lamp… while looking at the DesignBox and thinking of the technical complexity of the cardboard object with such a simple appearance. Think of the beauty of simple shapes, of the way in which the geometry is everywhere present in design, and then think of the natural progression of simple mathematical forms, from the cube to the square; this enables us as designers to create infinite possibilities by starting from the simplest point of departure! … A Comet lamp, beneficent and sparkling, like champagne, based on the universally attractive laws of geometry, from the starting point of a simple, well-made cardboard box”

(Both lamps in the light of day, after the fold…)

(more…)

February 8, 2011

Lisa Dahl’s “Suburban Export”

Lisa Dahl at work (photo by Daniel Carlson from Daniel Carlson NYC’s Flickr Photostream): photo on right from Lisa Dahl Studio Blog

In the past, Lisa Dahl has constructed little houses from wood grained contact paper (Sub Prime) and security envelopes of financial institutions (Trickle Down). This time, the houses are to be made from recycled packaging:

Suburban Export is a paper sculpture series that uses lightweight household cardboard to create small houses, formed from a single template, which are then arranged into neighborhoods based on suburban development patterns. Using this recyclable material to create art humorously points to the never ending flow of products that run through our households — some of which we can reuse or recycle, most of which we throw away. The name of this series “Suburban Export” resulted from the realization that trash is the main commodity that comes out of the residential zones of our cities.

COAHSI’s 2011 Original Work Grantees

(Another photo of the neighborhood, after the fold…)

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February 2, 2011

Wonderbread-Bag Rug

At the American Folk Art Museum: the “Wonderbread-Bag Rug”—(photos from: christiNYCa’s Flickr Photostream, Sean Whelan1’s Flickr Photostream, and Ruby Re-Usable’s Flickr Photostream)

“This rug was found in the Ledyard, Connecticut, attic of Desire Parker after her death. It was possibly created by Parker or an acquaintance. Made entirely of woven strands of plastic Wonderbread bags much like a nineteenth-century braided rag rug…”

American Folk Art Museum

In addition to uncertainty about who made the rug, the catalog also lists the date of its creation as “unknown.” Judging from the discernable “Scooby Doo” detail in the ball above, however, I think we can reasonably date the rug’s creation around 1974 or thereafter. (See my evidence at: RoadsidePictures’ Flickr Photostream)

Also good to know: yarn made from recycled plastic bags is called plarn.

(A bit more about Desire Parker, after the fold…)

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January 12, 2011

Dish Doctor Box

Another nice box featuring orthographic graphic design: The Marc Newson “Dish Doctor” dish rack carton, designed by Melina Kok. Cool, blue-print style illustrations provide an X-ray-like view of the package contents… (but is one of the panels flopped?)

Manufactured by Magis Design.

Photos from The Powerhouse Museum

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 7, 2010

One Year (in the life of George Maciunas)

Top left photo from l_c_m_tt_’s Flickr Photostream

At MOMA until May 9, 2011: George Maciunas’s “One Year”

ONE YEAR (1973-1974) is a art installation by Lithuania-born American artist George Maciunas (1931-1978) consisting of the empty containers of various food and household products that he consumed over the course of one year. The work reflects the American consumer landscape of the early 1970s and the monotony of Maciunas’ daily regimen.

(via: NYC ♥ NYC)

(If you click on the top left photo and look closely, you will note that, in addition to food, Maciunas consumed a lot of asthma medications. This helps to explain what follows, after the fold….)

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December 3, 2010

Martha Stewart Packaging

Having recently broached the subject of Martha Stewart, it’s only fair that we now honor the packaging work. Here are three interesting examples:

1. Cake-shaped cake mix boxes —or rather, slice-of-cake-shaped cake mix boxes. More meaningful than the celebrated “Perfect Slice of Summer” Kleenex boxes since, in this case, the shape actually signals something about its contents. Makes an appealing display and hopefully no one is so literal-minded as to imagine that the box contains a slice of cake!

On a more polyhedral note, there appear to be seven (rather than six) slice-shaped boxes on the cake dish above. Leading one to speculate whether this box’s angles are based on a heptagon rather than a hexagon. There are spaces between the boxes above, however, suggesting that arranged in a circle, they are not really meant to close-pack. It may be that the angles are more intuitive—or maybe these spaces are an open invitation to go ahead and pick one up. Still, as triangular prisms, they would certainly close-pack if alternated on a shelf. (See also: Trapezoidal Boxes)

2. The carton for this wine glass set has photos wrapping around each corner creating opportunities for larger, extended displays. Designed by Doyle Partners. (See also: The Incomplete Package: Part of a Larger Whole)

3. Nested mixing bowls carton by Brian Chojnowski (while at Doyle Partners). We like nested stuff and these are particularly nice illustrations. Also we like when packaging does this kind of orthographic projection thing—diagrammatically showing you what’s inside the box as if each side were a window. (another example: this Russian phone box)

Come to think of it, that’s something we should probably explore in some future post: orthographic graphic design.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 20, 2010

Shelf Reliance

Following up on yesterday’s train of thought about 1960s fallout shelters and their stockpiles of canned goods—(it’s “end-of-the-world week”, here on boxvox)—we find that President Kennedy’s impulse to privatize civil defense has apparently evolved over the years into what we now call the “survivalist” (or “preparedness”) movement. There are a number of businesses catering to this constituency. Shelf Reliance is one of them:

SHELF RELIANCE is a company that specializes in food storage, storage rotation, and emergency preparedness products. Our goal is to help families prepare for whatever tomorrow may bring, allowing them to feel confident if disaster strikes.

(from the About Us section of their web site)

Where some survivalist food packaging emulates a generic, civil defense look, Shelf Reliance’s “Thrive” brand is light and airy and uses a pastel color-code to differentiate between food groups. Their products are even carried by Costco.

Food rotation, the concept introduced by Better Homes & Garden in the late 1950s, seems to now be an established practice for many Americans. (I hadn‘t realized that.) What is it that Shelf Reliance’s customers should be preparing for? According to their web site:

• Natural Disaster
• Terrorism
• Labor Strike
• Economic Depression
• Drought
• Crop Failure
• Personal Tragedy
• Civil Unrest
• Unemployment

One big change from the 1960s—nuclear fallout is not mentioned.

(Some food rotation products and survivalist videos, after the fold

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October 19, 2010

Fallout Shelter Packaging

Today we look at packaged food in family fallout shelters.

In the 1960s, rather than promising “a chicken in every pot” president Kennedy called for “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.”

In his book, Populuxe—(in the chapter entitled “Just Push The Button”)—Thomas Hine makes an interesting point about Kennedy’s proposal for building home fallout shelters: that it would privatize civil defense.

Kennedy’s program… would have transformed civil defense from a community-based responsibility to one that was carried out by individual suburban families. Air-raid shelters were hardly a new thing, but previously they had been group facilities which mobilized the solidarity people feel when faced by common adversity. Kennedy’s program, which was welcomed by the building materials and construction industries, foresaw the fallout shelter as yet another feature of the suburban home… And the family, not the community, became the key unit of survival. This was so clear a reflection of the way in which American society perceived itself at the time that the novelty of the approach was scarcely noticed.

But the part of the fallout shelter that I wish to focus on here, is the well-stocked 1960s pantry. (Click on the photo above for post-apocalyptical product placement of a number of surviving brandname foods: Campbell’s, Lipton, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Spam, etc.)

Better Homes and Gardens… identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe

The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:

…in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. … The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

(One more well-stocked fallout shelter, after the fold…)

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October 7, 2010

Choi’s Package

(Note: “package” broken into two words—“pack” & “age”)

I don’t know why it is that “registered mail” should scare me so. Why is it that the first thought that pops into my head is: “Who’s suing me?” Do I subliminally associate the post office’s pink registered mail notice with the dreaded “pink slip”? —(Which was never generally pink to begin with.)

Whatever the source of this momentary anxiety, it was with equal portions of relief and delight that I realized that the ‘pack-age’ that I was signing for at the post office was this first volume of Choi’s Package —and that Beach Packaging Design’s work is included!

We’re pleased to be in such good company—other designers, whose work we’ve long admired—some of which I’ve even written about here on box vox.

Here’s how our 3 pages look… (click photos for close-up view)

(More pages, after the fold…)

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September 14, 2010

The Campari Soda Bottle

We come to the subject of the Campari Soda bottle in a roundabout way…

In the previous post we’d featured a 2007 Ingo Maurer light fixture, made from a Campbell’s Soup can. As it turns out this was not the only light fixture the company has made from an iconic consumer package.

Raffaele Celentano’s 2002 suspension lamp (above) combines ten Campari Soda bottles. A particularly canny choice, since the beverage is attractively colored, the bottles do not have labels and their cone shape causes them to fan out naturally like a ray of light.

Campari, itself, is officially a “bitter” and prior to being combined with soda, started out (like Angostura Bitters) as a patent medicine “health tonic” in the 1860s.

In 1932 Campari Soda was introduced in the conical bottle (on right) designed by Italian futurist painter —(and writer and sculptor and graphic designer)— Fortunato Depero.

(3 more Campari Soda images, after the fold…)

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September 13, 2010

Tin Can Lighting

Suddenly realized that we had never done a “round up” on tin can lighting…

Willem Heeffer’s “Campbell’s Soup Can Light” for Fuse Finds—(via: Unconsumption)—was preceded by Christoph Matthias and Hagen Sczech’s 2007 “Canned Light” for Ingo Maurer—proving once again that there is probably precedent for any Campbell’s Soup, pop-art paraphernalia that can be thought of. (See also: Campbell’s Spray Paint Cans)

Heeffer also did a “Heinz Beanz” of his hanging light (above) and both of the Fuse Finds lights feature a “recycled tuna can ceiling rose.”

“Recessed lights” are sometimes called "can lights" or “canned lighting" (or canister lights). I haven't seen any upcycled-tin-can recessed lights, however. Why not? Probably because the main idea of recessed lighting is for the fixture to be self-effacing. Whereas, with this type of tin-can lighting, the whole point of the excercise is for the recycled tin cans to be visible and identifable.

We have touched once before on hanging tin can lights in our post about Steve Roden’s audio-visual intallation work.

Roden’s 2005 “transmission” installation at the “In Resonance” show at the Seattle Center

The idea of using tin cans as light fixtures has been in the air for a while now…

There was the 2009 “Tin Can Night Light” designed by Adi Zaffran and David Keller.

The idea has also been expressed in the form of advertising premiums and promotional restaurant lighting. (OK: some of this is aluminum can lighting.)

Photo on left: via BingoBox’s Etsy shop; photo on right via: OutdoorsWebShots

(These lamps are also reminiscent of Helmut Smits’s 2006 “Coca-Cola Light”)

A battery powered tin can light—a juakali lamp—is reportedly useful during Nairobi blackouts. (via Afrigadget.com)

And since wiring a lamp is not exactly rocket science, there are innumerable DIY examples to be found…

Upper left: a tin-can Sputnik light via: ReadyMadeBlogs; upper right: a coffee can light with a switch via DesignBoom; lower left: a goose-neck tin can reading light via Instructables; lower right: Peter van Zoetendaal’s “Tiny Tim”—another Campbell’s Soup can light; center photo: “tin can pendant lights” from Craft Hacker

(3 more, after the fold…)

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