Box Vox

packaging as content

May 2, 2012

Packaging of Miniature Dummy Heads

Speaking of miniature stuff, I’ve had this leftover image since “Dummy Week” last March. (See: Package Design for Dummies)

I got the image from Clinton Detweiler’s site, but I think it originally came from Tom Ladshaw’s “Gottle O’ Geer” site.

Like dime store packaging, the carded packs for these novelty keychains were structurally simple and graphically in-your-face:

“The keychains were sold two different ways. You could order them in “loose bulk” (for insertion in gum machine capsules, etc.) or carded.  The flocked head keychains were only available carded.”

Tom Ladshaw


Die-cut carded pack for Jerry Mahoney dummy head keychain. (via: Toy Tent)

 

May 1, 2012

Handful of Miniature Soda Cans

Via: Western Paperback Novels

April 26, 2012

Package Eats Logo

Sometimes an illustrated open mouth, depicted on a package, is not a window, but a graphic device containing the product logo. Caveman Cookies and Snackle Mouth packages both have stacked logotypes contained in the gaping mouths of their illustrated characters. (Kristina Sacci designed and illustrated the packaging for Caveman Cookies; Nate Dyer of Moxie Sozo designed and illustrated the Snack Mouth packages.)

Package design for Fresh & Easy kids cereals (by P&W) uses a similar device, except that, along with the Fresh & Easy logo, the mouths contain additional typography.

(One more example, after the fold…) (more…)

April 25, 2012

Mouth-as-window: Package Eats Product


Top: Tequechongos!; 2nd row: Dusan Čežek’s Booster Engery 4-pack box; 3rd row: Design Herynek’s Adriana Mini-Pasta; bottom: Kanikko crab-shaped candy crab packaging

The 1971 ad for two discontinued Tootsie Roll products (Tootsie Tots & Tootsie Jesters ad from Gregg Koenig’s Flickr Photostream) reminded me that I’d been seeing more mouth-shaped windows on packages lately. Maybe now’s a good time for another round up.

Most of it’s food packaging, of course, but not all. As previously observed, when gaping mouths appear on packaging, they are not human mouths.

But seeing them all together, what’s really notable is that they are all illustrations. No photography.

I always liked the simplicity of seeing the product through a mouth-shaped window. As a consumer you’re invited to identify with the character (animal, monster, etc.) and imagine that product in your mouth.

There are also packages that open in mouth-like ways to dispense the product, but however clever these solutions, unless you’re a baby bird, there’s something off-putting about the idea of taking food from another mouth.


Colgate’s 2011 cross marketing effort to sell toothpaste from within a pizza box

Preston Grubbs (whose Spherical-Wedge Juice Packs we looked at last month) connects a chain of three boxes to form a puppet-like “S’mores” kit, in which the upper and lower boxes form a monster character’s mouth and the middle box serves as a sort of “serving suggestion.”

(A non-food monster pack example, after the fold…) (more…)

April 6, 2012

Lion Bar Egg Package

Not sure what the connection is between lions and Easter eggs, but I do like this Nestlé Lion Bar milk chocolate egg & 2 Lion Bars box.


Photo from Elysia in Wonderland’s Flickr Photostream

(More about lions, eggs and The Troggs, after the fold…) (more…)

March 29, 2012

Anthropomorphic Condiment Packaging


Photo of “Mr. Ketchup” from Inha Leex Hale ’s Flickr Photostream

I remember we featured an anthropomorphic jar of Miracle Whip manning a cash register back in 2009, but these European anthro-packs were brand new to me.

Amora and Calvé are both part of “the Hellmann’s worldwide brand family.” (See also: Our Family of Products)


Via: Global Packaging Gallery (Photo by Krissy Sauter)

Does this package design infringe on Bart Simpson’s trademark hairstyle? At any rate, the Calvé character has siblings and cousin’s as shown in the Amora commerical below…

(More anthropomorphic condiment, after the fold…) (more…)

March 28, 2012

Preston Grubbs’s Spherical Wedge Juice Packs

When I first saw these pictures of Preston Grubbs’s orange-colored, orange-shaped juice box concept, it reminded of other packages, designed to resemble their contents. (Or their origins.)

We’ve seen packages shaped like whole oranges and packages shaped like half an orange and, at first, what I thought I was seeing here were juice boxes shaped like an 1/8 of an orange. But that’s not right. The net bag contains 10 pieces. As if an orange were cut into 5 longitudinal, spherical wedge shaped pieces and the cut in half along the equator.

See also: Package as Skin, Packaging and Plastic Fruit and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges

–Randy Ludacer

March 16, 2012

Packaging Puppets & Evangelical Ventriloquism

In addition to the Life Cereal box ventriloquist’s dummy that we looked at yesterday, Clinton Detweiler made quite a few other puppets from empty retail packaging.

What wasn’t explored in yesterday’s post was that the purpose of many of these packaging dummies is religious instruction.

These product containers that were designed to carry cleansing products for laundry, have been converted into puppets used to present Bible promises guaranteed to cleanse lives.

“What good is it for you to GAIN the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?”

“For ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace BOLD-ly, so that we may receive mercy…”

–Clinton Detweiler

Lucas Conley, in his book, Obsessive Branding Disorder, compared retail spaces like the Apple Store to a “brand church.” And, in fact, this morning’s news mentions that just yesterday fervent consumers were lining up overnight outside of NY’s Apple Store, to purchase the new version of the iPad this morning.  Some marketers have tried to bottle this kind of customer enthusiasm as “evangelism marketing.”

So I’m familiar with the idea that stores nowadays were inspiring a more church-like devotion from consumers, but I hadn’t thought about it the other way round… that churches were becoming more like stores.

Just as consumers happily identify with anthropomorphic retail packages and the concept of fraudulent packaging resonates as a political metaphor, preachers are also finding parables in consumer packaging.

We’ve seen evidence of this before in the content of sermons about the Entenmann’s box and deceptive frozen food packaging, but I had never realized that the packages were actually attending church.

And I never knew there was such a thing as “Christian ventriloquism”…

In the late fifties a new theory on how to sway children to Jesus swept the culture and has survived for almost fifty years against all odds. Ventriloquism. The craze of using ventriloquist dummies to teach Jesus to kids became so huge in fact, that there remains today a heavily attended Christian Ventriloquists Convention held in San Diego every year. Hundreds of Christian ventriloquist LPs have permeated America, the biggest star of which was, of course, Little Marcy who recorded for several major Christian record labels.

Listener Kliph Nesteroff, From Subculture to Major Industry:
Mike Warnke and The Roots of Christian Stand-Up Comedy
WFMU Blog, February 11, 2007

These things being the case, I guess it makes total sense that today’s parishioners might be better able to hear “the word of God” when it comes from a detergent box.

–Randy Ludacer

March 15, 2012

Dummy Packaging | Packaging Dummies

1. Dummy Packaging

“Dummy packages” are the prototypes that package designers make for clients wishing to evaluate a new package design, or as part of a proposal presentation to a store buyer. (Also known as: “mock ups” or “comps”)  Traditionally, these dummy packages are constructed by hand (scored, cut & folded) at a drawing table.

The commercial above for Life Cereal shows their version of this type of dummy package.

These days, the dummy packaging we make is increasingly digital dummy packaging. That is, simulated 3D product images now serve many of the same purposes that were once served only by traditional mock ups.

2. Packaging Dummies

Research for Tuesday’s “Packaging for Dummies” led me to discover Clinton Detweiler’s ventriloquist dummies made from cereal boxes. One of which happens to be a Life Cereal box.

Life and Total were the two cereal brands most frequently requested as puppets. Kix came in as a close third place. I made a good number of these that were sold during the ’80s. Then as some of you know, I offered cereal box puppets (moving mouth and eyes) again in 2009.

–Clinton Detweiler

I was sorry not to find any videos of these cereal box dummies in use.

(More dummy cereal box packaging, after the fold…) (more…)

March 13, 2012

Package Design for Dummies

It all started with this bronze head. (An enigmatic Christmas gift from my brother that he picked up at an auction somewhere.) A serious commitment of permanent bronze to an ephemeral cartoon head. At least, I thought this looked like a cartoon character. Or maybe a product mascot? Clearly, I needed to find out whose face this was.

Howdy Doody? No. Alfred E. Neuman? No.

Then I noticed some writing on the back of the neck, inside the head. (The head is no longer affixed to its wooden base.) I couldn’t read the writing because it was backwards and it extended way up beyond where the neck curves into the head. I thought about peering in there with a dental mirror, but I didn’t have one of those.

Then I thought of using some modeling clay to get an imprint…

“©1960 Columbia Pictures Corporation
A JURO Creation”

“Juro Novelties” turns out to be a manufacturer of ventriloquist dummies so I’m thinking they must have, for some reason, immortalized one of their dummies with this bronze statue.

My guess is that it was made by actually casting one the plastic, dummy heads. That would explain why the writing was backwards and why the details on the inside felt sharper.

The Columbia Pictures copyright lines suggests a movie tie-in product. But what movie did this ventriloquist’s dummy appear in?

The only Columbia Pictures picture I can find that that was released in 1960 and has anything to do with ventriloquism, was a movie called “Stop, Look & Laugh.”

This movie features the Three Stooges and ventriloquist, Paul Winchell who used two dummies: Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. Of those two characters, I think the one that our “Juro Creation” head most closely resembles is Jerry Mahoney. (An actual Jerry Mahoney dummy head on left via: Ventriloquist Central Blog)

And Juro Novelties did manufacture Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dolls so that sort of fits.)

Setting aside the remaining unsolved mystery —(Why make a bronze dummy head?)— I wondered how Jerry Mahoney and the other “Juro Celebrity Dolls” were packaged?

In my expert opinion, the very best package design for dummies was the “dummy carrying valise” above. This value-added retail carton with handles, references the sort of battered show-biz suitcases that, in those days, itinerant ventriloquists presumably carried their dummies around in. Classic sixties styling with modern trapezoidal shapes, overlapping illustrations and a nice faux alligator pattern in the background. Also note the low 1960s price of $14.95… (Package photo via: Mr. D’s Daily Ventriloquist Journal; catalog ad via: eBay)

(More Juro Novelties packaging for dummies, after the fold…) (more…)

March 7, 2012

Trix Cereal X-Ray Pack

About a year ago, we featured some package design by Mark Oliver, Inc. (above, left) that used actual-sized product photography of cereal to cover the outside of some Vita Crunch cereal boxes. Not just a photo of cereal in a bowl with milk, but a continuous, all-over pattern of cereal covering the front, tops and sides of each box. As if the boxes were transparent and we could see the contents inside. (See also: Packaging & What Lies Beneath)

“The client wanted to sell breakfast cereals priced at 99 cents each. The budget was tight and limited to process color. We made the product the hero. We laid it on scanners to record, used 3-D type to grab attention, and created distinctive, fun, colorful boxes that jump from the shelves.”

Later I saw this Trix Cereal packaging and realized that there had been an earlier precedent for this kind of X-ray package design for cereal.

Above: the introductory Trix ad from a 1956 issue of Life Magazine.

These earlier, rabbit-less Trix packages were a revelation to me… modern, in the same way that Jackson Pollack’s “allover” drip paintings were considered modern in  those days…

“Allover painting refers to a canvas covered in paint from edge to edge and from corner to corner, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. This is a radically different approach from modes of painting that offer specific focal points, such as the sitter’s face in the case of a portrait. With an allover composition, our eyes are invited to wander the canvas from the top to the bottom, following lines, shapes, and colors.”

Allover Painting, Museum of Modern Art

As a kid, I was convinced that I could correctly identify colors on black & white television. Perhaps it was advertising like this that gave me this idea. Above, is a screen shot from one of the earliest black & white TV commercials for Trix. The way they labeled the colors on screen (raspberry red, orange, lemon yellow) reminds me of Jasper Johns’ allover paintings from around the same time.

Below: Jubillee and False Start from 1959. (via: Flourishing Mirth)

(More Trix-ray vision, after the fold…) (more…)

February 22, 2012

ABC Bottles

More to spell out on the subject of letter-shaped package design…

The drawings above are from Mikelyn Roderick’s 2003 patent for “Letter and Number Shaped” bottles.

I couldn’t find the product as envisioned here, although I did find a matching “A” and “B” bottle on eBay. I suppose the manufacturer may have originally made all 26 letter-shaped bottles, but if certain letters just didn’t sell well, those letters may have been discontinued.

Below are three vintage perfume bottles that represent my best effort at finding A, B & C shaped examples….


On left: Liz Claiborne bottle (via: Gisellez); center: Beau Belle by Bourjois (via: Perfume Projects); on right: early Chanel bottle with “C” cap (also from: Perfume Projects)

Tomorrow’s subject? X-Y-Z boxes.

(Roderick’s patent, after the fold…) (more…)

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 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 25, 2012

Ceci n’est pas une Skippers pipe

Jonna Pedersen (whose sculptures we looked at yesterday) entitled the painting above “This Is a Pipe.” Making clever use of a brand of licorice pipes that I was not aware of —“Skippers Pipes”—and making reference to that popular paradox of representational art: The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. In Magritte’s painting a pipe appears above a caption that declares in French, “This is not a pipe”…

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!

In Pedersen’s painting, Magritte’s paradox is given an additional twist, since the product portrayed is, itself, a faux pipe. [Full disclosure: when I was in art school, I combined a 6 inch lenngth of galvanized heating pipe with an elbow joint (forming a pipe-like shape) and gave it the old “Ceci n’est pas une pipe inscription.]

Originally trademarked in 1966 by Chicago based Leaf Brands, Inc., the product has recently come under fire as a simulated tobacco candy product.(like candy cigarettes) and appears to be somewhat discontinued. That is to say, I can find no mention of it on Leaf’s web site.

Matching Skippers Pipes wrapper photo from mulch.thief’s Flickr Photostream


Upper left: photo from Christiane Torden; on right: counter top display box from Fine Little Day; lower photo from After The Denim

Note how the lower box has additional faux features. This is not a wooden gift box tied up with red string.

(My own non-pipe work, after the fold…)

(more…)

January 16, 2012

Super PAC Packaging

MasteySuperPacSuperPacs
As we enjoy a new, hyperbolic political season, generously funded by large amounts of Super Political Action Committee money, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at some earlier types of Super Pac.

Not surprisingly, the name was previously associated with packaging.

SuperPac, Inc., whose logo appears at top, offers “A Tradition of Excellence in Flexographic Printing.”

SuperPAC™ (logo: above center) is a trademark of Thomasville Furniture:

Thomasville’s promise to provide our customers with the best overall kitchen, bath, and other room solutions initiated our development of SuperPAC, our patent pending packaging technique.

And SuperPac is also the name of a British company that makes a car stereo accessory. (Logo by Frankman Design)

Superpac is the new way to hold your detachable car stereo front. Designed to replace the dull black plastic case supplied with most car stereos, the Superpac offers you a stylish way to protect your cherished face-off style car stereo.

Mastey de Paris carries a SuperPac “Intensive Reconstructor Conditioner for Stressed, Damaged Hair” (above, right)

Superpac reconstructs damaged hair, rebuilding and reinforcing the hair’s protein chains. Superpac enables hair to retain its elasticity and structural integrity with newfound bounce and resilience.

Mastey de Paris

There was also a Timberland Super Pac boot. (via: Gwar Izm)

Nowadays, a candidate whose political campaign benefits from Super PAC money is not supposed to “coordinate directly” with his or her Super PAC benefactor. In practice, however, a candidate’s Super PAC is often run by a close ally—a Super PAC man.  (e.g., Jon Stewart is Steven Colbert’s “Super PAC man”)

Not to be confused with an earlier “Super Pac-Man.”

SuperPac-ManTop & center: Commodore 64 “Super Pac-Man” packaging from Moby Games; bottom photo: a General Mills Pac-Man cereal with “Super Pac-Man Marshmallows” from Jason Liebig’s flickr Photostream

Now, if we were willing to be more liberal about the spelling of the term—accepting say “PAK” as a reasonable variant (as in Political Action Kommittee?)—then there’s even more to think about.

(More, after the fold…)

(more…)

January 12, 2012

Purple Cow Packaging

PurpleCow-PackagingVintage 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

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