Box Vox

packaging as content

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 24, 2012

Candy-Colored Stripes


Fruit Stripe gum photo from MeBeMelissa’s Flickr Photostream; the other three wrappers are from Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream

With multicolored products lines, colors are often used to differentiate between fruit flavors. When candies come in assorted packages, those assortments are often represented by candy-striped, rainbow colors. Skittles, of course, also uses this idea in their tagline, but lots of candy makers do the basically same thing.


1989 Skittles wrapper with “Rainbow Machine” offer from Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream


1950s Life Savers 5-Flavors wrapper from Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream

The color stripes on a roll of assorted Life Savers make a sort of orthographic diagram of the contents. Technically not a “rainbow” since non-consecutive colors are adjacent, and yet multi-colored stripes will invariably convey the rainbow idea. Note: 5 flavors, but only 4 different colors.


Back of a 1986 box of Circus Fun cereal from Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream

The illustration for this Circus Fun cereal, “free Life Savers” offer, clearly represents a rainbow and also adds an additional lighter yellow to represent the fifth flavor.

In the 2010 “retro” package, above, Life Savers rearranged the color order, creating a bona fide rainbow striped wrapper. (Photo via: A Treasury of…)


Beech-Nut Fruit Stripe pack from a vintage ad on Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream

Similar to the the Life Saver 5-Flavor assortment, Fruit Stripe gum’s also had five flavors, but only 4 colors in their technically incorrect rainbow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They were always more about the stripes than the rainbows. Love their ad in black and white. (See also: Trix Cereal Colors in black & white)


Beech-Nut Assorted Candy Drop wrapper from Jason Liebig’s Flickr Photostream

An earlier Beech-Nut wrapper for Assorted Candy Drops, however, does use uses a rainbow sunburst with colors in correct spectral order.

(More candy stripes, after the fold…) (more…)

April 23, 2012

Rainbow Cigarettes & Rainbow Matches

Two more unrelated “Rainbow” brands: Rainbow cigarettes and Rainbow safety matches.

I guess it’s officially “Rainbow Stripes Week” on box vox, this being the third day and all. (Tomorrow: Candy Colored Stripes)

–Randy Ludacer

April 20, 2012

Rainbow Striped Bottles

More spectral color branding. This time: bottles.

Absolut Vodka’s 2008 limited edition bottle (marking the 30 anniversary of the LGBT gay pride flag) and a 2010 Antico Frantoio Muraglia ceramic olive oil bottle (“…made by the expert hands of skilled master ceramists and covered with rainbow stripes.”)

Earlier rainbow branded liquids include Rainbow Beverages soda bottles (an ACL label with a monochrome rainbow!) and, below: Rainbow Beer and Rainbow Whiskey, separate brands whose labels both included full-color rainbows and metallic gold borders.


Bottle photo from AntiqueBottles.net; label from Newfoundland Beer History


Label photo from Etsy; bottle photo from RubyLane

And because I like miniature stuff and I never know when to quit…

(one more, after the fold…) (more…)

April 19, 2012

The Optics of Rainbow Striped Package Design

We’ve already focused on multicolored product lines and their effectiveness in product differentiation when displayed all together, but just recently it occurred to me that there was another kind of rainbow packaging in which all the refracted colors come together in a singular package design.

Rainbow stripes as a packaging motif, probably reached their peak in the 1970s, although they really got started in 1968 with Paul Giambarba’s spectral branding for Polaroid:

“The original color stripes were to differentiate between the new Type 108 Colorpack Film and the gray color stripes that identified Type 107 black and white film.”

Apple used a similar sequence of colored stripes in spectral order for the second incarnation of their logo in 1977. Asked whether the rainbow colors were a reference to “hippy” culture, logo designer, Rob Janoff said,

“Partially it was a really big influence. Both Steve and I came from that place, but the real solid reason for the stripes was that the Apple II was the first home or personal computer that could reproduce images on the monitor in color.”

So in each case (Polaroid’s color film and Apple’s color monitor) the rainbow stripes are meant to convey the color capabilities of the product. Their founders —Polaroid’s Edwin Land and Apple’s Steve Jobs— have also been compared and found to be similar in some ways. (See Forbes article: What Steve Jobs Learned From Edwin Land of Polaroid)

Giambarba’s package design for Polaroid explored the geometric possibilities of the company’s rainbow stripe motif in some depth for nearly two decades.

Most of Giambarba’s designs displayed well, and some used the trick of wrapping shapes around corners to achieve completion when displayed. (See: The Incomplete Package: Part of a Larger Whole)

While Giambarba’s rainbow striped branding may have preceded Apple’s, there were also other rainbow-striped cultural influences which may have played a role.

Frank Stella’s 1966 painting, Concentric Squares apparently preceded Polaroid’s rainbow striped packaging by two years. Like Polaroid and Apple, Stella’s fluorescent paintings introduced a new color capability whereas his previous paintings had been black (and white).

(More rainbow striped ruminations, after the fold…) (more…)

April 18, 2012

Schaedler Pinwheel

Speaking of “pinwheel” logos, I remember applying for job in the late 1970s at an interesting company called Pinwheel. My partner worked at Photo-Lettering in those days and I would have liked nothing better than to have worked at the similarly high-profile firm with the cool spiral logo.

Founded by old school New York type designer, John N. Schaedler, Pinwheel was the pre-digital precursor to color-proofing companies like Kaleidoscope.

“Pinwheel color proofing produces advertising comps, package dummies, decals, TV color corrections, rub-down transfers, art for slides, sales presentations and just about everything. It can reproduce fine type and clean solids in pinpoint register. Unbelievably versatile, the process can provide one copy or hundreds, quickly, and at reasonable prices.”

The word “Pinwheel” in the ad on the right was set in Schaedler’s font, “Paprika.” (now available as Tabasco Twin) He also designed the spiral trademark, which I remember seeing printed in red, although I can find no examples of that online.

Perhaps Schaedler’s most lasting contribution to the graphic arts has been his ultra-precise “Schaedler Rule” now manufactured by his company Shaedler Quinzel, Inc. based in Parsippany, NJ.

“Taro Yamashita, a tireless staff lettering artist and photo technician at the Schaedler studio, helped design and develop the products now known as Schaedler Precision Rules. His original drawings were done by hand although computers and design software have subsequently been utilized to achieve greater accuracy and consistency.”

While desktop computers effectively put typesetting and various other graphic arts industries out of business, there is still occasionally a need for designers to measure actual stuff.

(For more spiral graphic design, see: Pillsbury)

–Randy Ludacer

April 17, 2012

Art & Kitty Litter

On left is one of Robert Gober’s 1989 “Fine Fare Cat Litter” sculptures. (From an edition of seven)…

With Cat Litter, Gober invokes a “hand-made-ready-made”, stemming from the Duchampian tradition. While Marcel Duchamp chose everyday, industrially produced objects as his ready-made works and elevated them to the status as an art object in the act of re-producing and declaring them to be so, Gober scrupulously recreates an already existing product; Gober uses plaster-casting and then paints by hand the imagery to imitate the real object.

In speaking about the Cat Litter sculptures, Gober explains, “The kitty litter I never saw as being that far a step from the wedding dress…for me the kitty litter was to a large degree a metaphor for a couple’s intimacy – that when you make a commitment to an intimate relationship, that involved taking care of that other person’s body in sickness and in health. If I had chosen to do a box of diapers, which is an equivalent of a bag of cat litter, it would have been obvious. But because I was juxtaposing a low symbol which a high symbol and a deflated symbol with an inflated one, people had a very hard time reconciling the two, and they had a hard time, I think, seeing that I could be connecting the two with some respect”

Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 1999 (via: Phillips de Pury & Company)

Fine Fare is a New York “Metro Area” supermarket chain. (There was also a UK “Fine Fare” but I don’t believe they are connected.) I like their multi-colored pinwheel logo on the Gober sculpture, which I think has inherent fine art associations having to do with color wheels and additive color mixing. The animated gif on the right is not from Fine Fare’s logo, but from the website of package printer, J.M. Fry Printing Inks.

(See also: Untitled Packaging Sculptures)

–Randy Ludacer

April 16, 2012

The Trickle-Up Effect


On left: one of Linden Gledhill’s photographs of paint reacting to sound vibrations; center: Patrick Hill’s “Gravity Wine” package design concept; on right: a painted jar from an Etsy listing (now down, but the same object appears on majama29’s Flickr Photostream)

I’m no economist, but I always suspected that being wealthy didn’t automatically make someone a “job creator” and I wondered whether the whole “trickle-down” theory of economics might not make a lot more sense the other way round.

As it turns out, there is a “trickle-up” theory:

The trickle up effect argues itself as more effective than the trickle down effect because people who have less tend to buy more. In other words, the poor are more inclined than the wealthy to spend their money. This being so, proponents of the trickle up effect believe that if the lower and lower-middle classes are given benefits, such as tax breaks or subsidies, the increased funds would be spent at a much higher rate than would the upper class, given similar fund increases. Furthermore, the trickle up effect argues, many upper-class individuals do not spend their entire yearly salary to begin with, which is an indication that they will not spend any additional funds. Instead, they will save additional funds, thereby withholding those funds from the economy and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Wikipedia’s Entry on The Trickle Up Effect


Gravity-defying, paint-dripped ceramic planters project from The Lovely Cupboard

(More trickle-up imagery, after the fold…) (more…)

April 13, 2012

Package Hacking: Evan Roth’s Propulsion Paintings

Not the kind of package hacking we sometimes think of — where empty containers are given an entirely different function. In Evan Roth’s sculptures and videos, the spray paint cans are not empty and still work as intended. The “hack” is usually more along the lines of an “off-label” use for spray paint.

The sculpture above, for example, is actually a tool for painting. The spray paint cans are arranged, sputnik-style in an array around a basketball, and are still fully functional, but their nozzles are now depressed by rolling the whole thing across a surface. 

In his “Propulsion Painting” videos, the cans also work as they were designed to—(to spray paint)—but have been modified to be more or less self-actuating. So that they can spray continuously without needing a person to hold down the nozzle. Like bug bombs, only with artistic intentions.

As with yesterdays tin can engine videos, the soundtracks are half the fun.

(More, after the fold…)

(more…)

April 12, 2012

10 Tin Can Engines

Ten YouTube videos of “tin can” engines. These are homemade Stirling engines made by different people from recycled cans and other readily available hardware & household materials. (via: Boyd’s Tin Can Stirlings)

This is a fairly haphazard selection. I like the various engine noise soundtracks and the glimpse that they offer into the lives of tin can engine enthusiasts.

(5 more, after the fold…) (more…)

April 11, 2012

Packaging and Peripatetic Desire


On left: Untitled, 1993 — clay sculpture dating from the Song dynasty (960 – 1279) in glass Johnnie Walker Red Label bottle; on right: Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994 — clay sculpture dating from Tang dynasty (618-907) in glass Absolut Kurant bottle

Two more artworks by Ai Weiwei, predating and prefiguring the modified ancient urns cited in the previous post.

In 1993, Ai Weiwei returned to a China that was fast becoming a culture based in consumerism. Not only was China eagerly embracing commodities from the West, the West was equally keen to purchase Chinese cultural material. Antique markets around Beijing were selling ancient Chinese artifacts. Ai Weiwei began visiting these markets and collecting examples of antiques created throughout China’s imperial history, learning how pieces from different dynasties were characterised by distinct forms, styles and markings.

The objects Ai Weiwei found in these markets soon became the starting point for a new direction in his artmaking. Ai Weiwei used the objects in a development of his experimentation with readymades, shifting his focus from everyday objects to objects that had already had significant cultural value…

In each of these artworks, Ai Weiwei combines two very different readymade objects in the one work. The antique sculptures represent the skill, time and artistry involved in the production of handcrafted cultural artifacts that have survived for centuries through China’s turbulent history. In contrast, the bottles represent the new China, symbols of consumer goods, mass production and the influence of Western culture.

Georgia Close, Ai Weiwei: Under Construction

About the Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, the artist has this to say :

“Within this traditional repository of peripatetic desire and fantasy materializes an elegantly poised stone courtesan over one thousand years old. This work humorously combines symbols of two of man’s chief intoxications while playing off the opposites of unique artifact and disposable object, painstaking craftwork and mass production, antiquity and modernity.”

–Ai Weiwei

While I’m not sure what’s peripatetic about a bottle of liquor, the implications of a figure trapped inside a bottle (the ancient drinker trading places with the contents of a modern bottle) is traditionally a metaphor for alcoholism. The puzzle of how the artifacts were made to fit into these “impossible bottles” here suggests the insolubility of the antiquity/modernity problem. (The past, consumed by the present.)

–Randy Ludacer

 

April 10, 2012

Coca-Cola Urns

Although the Han Dynasty urn on the left was originally fired sometime between 206 BC and 220 AD and the decorative “syrup urn” on the right was fired nearly 2000 years later, in the late 1800s or early 1900s, the two objects seem related, none-the-less.

1. The urn on the left is one of Ai Weiwei’s contemporary sculptures using appropriated ancient artifacts.

… Ai’s unprecedented use of Neolithic and Han dynasty vessels as “readymades” that the artist subjects to a variety of procedures. These include marking 2000-year-old clay urns with hand-painted inscriptions of the “Coca-Cola” logo, dipping them into vats of industrial paint, smashing them on the ground in performances for the camera, and grinding the vessels into powder. Writing in the exhibition’s catalog essay about Ai’s “gestural practice” of defacing and destroying of these ancient objects to transform them into works of contemporary art, Beijing-based critic Philip Tinari remarks that these works provide “the illusion of clarity alongside the persistent specter of ambiguity.” What appears at first “like the sublimation of an ancient object’s financial value and cultural worth into a different yet parallel carrier of updated value and worth” also serves as a “satire of the ruling regime’s approach to its patrimony, and of contemporary China’s curious relation to its past, a situation where destruction of historical artifacts happens almost daily.”

Arcadia University art Gallery

2. The second urn is one of the ceramic “syrup urns” made by the Wheeler Pottery Company for turn-of-the-century soda fountains.


Upper left photo: from the Smithsonian; lower left photo of syrup urn on exhibit at Atlanta’s “Pemberton Place”: from jared422_80’s Flickr Photostream; on right: broken syrup urn from Dan Morphy Auctions; lower right ornament from: eBay

In 1896, The Coca-Cola Company embarked on a program of offering award premiums to the fountain operators selling our beverage.  Among the items offered as premiums were these porcelain dispensers, which, in essence, were not entirely dispensers as they are known today, but rather were promotional units designed for the point of sale.

The dispensers were made by the Wheeling Pottery Company, Wheeling, West Virginia.   These units dispensed the syrup by gravity flow through a faucet placed beneath the bowl.  They were an ornament for the soda fountain and were shaped and elaborately designed reflecting late Victorian motifs.

Phil Mooney, Coca-Cola Conversations:  Syrup Urn

As with ancient Chinese pottery, some syrup urns are “authentic” and some are reproductions. In the 1950s Coca-Cola produced a commemorative “hard rubber” version. There are also smaller reproductions like the one holding pencils above and the 3 inch tall ornament on the lower right.

–Randy Ludacer

April 9, 2012

Shari Mendelson


“Pom Vessel and Vinegar Urn” plastic from discarded bottles, hot glue, acrylic polymer, paint, 11″x3″x3″ each, 2009-10

While hunting for other examples of postmodern structural packaging, I happened upon Shari Mendelson’s “vessels.”

Sort of the other side of the postmodern/ancient coin: taking plastic bottles that may not seem obviously ornamental to us, Medelson deftly reconstitutes them into decorative antiquities.

Dasani water bottles are particularly prized for their color and shape, but she’ll take an Evian or Volvic bottle in a pinch. Recently, she was hankering after Poland Spring bottles…

“I’ll be walking behind someone in Midtown and they’ll be drinking a bottle of water, and I’ll just want it.”

Talking With Shari Mendelson
Penelope Green, NY Times, June 23, 2010


“My Metropolitan” (installation proposal)


“5 Vessels” plastic from discarded bottles, hot glue, acrylic polymer, paint, 7″x5″x5″ -12″x5″x5″, 2009-10

(More vessels, 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…)

April 5, 2012

Postmodern Structural Packaging

If “form follows function” is a modernist idea, then using mock functional features as decorative elements is surely “postmodern.” Hence, the little Polar mixed fruit jar’s tiny useless lug handles may suggest old world tradition, but are in no way functional handles.

Similarly postmodern, are the bottles with mock, pitcher-style spouts like the Tropicana orange juice and Coombs Family Farms maple syrup jugs below.

Here, a pointed spout shape may point up the pourability of the bottle’s contents, but it is through the hole in the cap that the pouring actually happens.

I’m thinking there must be other examples.

–Randy Ludacer

April 4, 2012

Package Design for Losers


Top left: Poynter Products’ “The Loser” liquor dispenser package (from the-empress’s Flickr Photostream; on right: “Tol’able David” video cover; lower left: “Drunkard’s Cloak” wine label; on right: “Barrel Apparel” costume packaging (from eBay)

Package design for losers? A barrel.

I went ahead and titled this one as a companion piece to last month’s Package Design for Dummies. Although it has even less to do with “package design” than that earlier post about ventriloquist dummies.

“Loser” is not a term I much like. It’s one thing when it’s used to describe a non-winner in a fair competition, but as an epithet for your less successful acquaintances, it’s like social Darwinism, up close and personal.

Since the Poynter Products liquor dispenser (above left) is named “The Loser,” however, and since “loss” does seem to describe most of the different reasons that a person might be reduced to wearing a barrel, I thought it was apt in this case.

Barrel as garment: 4 kinds of loser…

1. Punishment

The “drunkard’s cloak” was a humiliating pillory for alcoholics in the 1600s. Forcing the drunkard to wear a barrel was deemed a fitting punishment. (Loss of dignity)

The photos below, however, show a more recent barrel/pillory used in 1932 to punish prisoners at Florida’s Sunbeam Prison Camp. (Loss of life)

A demonstration of barrel restraint worn by Arthur Maillefert in prison days before his death. The 19 year old inmate, a resident of New Jersey, died in the Sunbeam Prison Camp in Florida. He was strangled by the chain that held him in place while he was unable to help himself to stand again because his feet were in stocks. The Maillefert case of abuse received much attention and was steadily reported on by the New York Times.

FloridaMemory.com


Photo on left from University of Washington digital archives; comic book cover via: The Creepshow

2. Modesty

A far less troubling reason for wearing a barrel is personal modesty. (Loss of clothes) Usually seen in outdoors scenarios where clothes have gone missing and the barrel serves as improvised clothing. Usually played for laughs, as in this clip from the 1921 silent film, “Tol’able David”…

3. Poverty

It’s not entirely clear when wearing a “bankruptcy barrel” became a metaphor for poverty. Similar to using a barrel as improvised replacement clothing for modesty’s sake, but here the implication is that you just cannot afford clothing to begin with. (Loss of money)

Although wooden barrels are now a fairly archaic form of packaging, the meaning of wearing one in this context is still well understood.

The second photo (in color) is of Jim “Poorman” Trenton wearing a barrel inscribed with the words “POORMANS NATION” last October in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

The photo, 2nd from the right is of Alan Moore wearing a barrel while “singing about poverty” during a 1984 exhibition at ABC No Rio, entitled, “Island of Negative Utopia.”

(The 4th and final “loser,” after the fold…) (more…)

April 3, 2012

Appropriated Ready Mades & Customized Containers


Landforms, 2011 (“Customised fabric conditioner containers”)

Some subtle sculptures with groupings of detergent and fabric softener bottles by Russell Hill. I like the the way he organizes these consumer products according to his own formal concerns. Lining them up by size, level of contents and color. (via: MKTG)

The thing with the rising and falling levels of fabric conditioner also reminds me of artwork by Tony Feher and Cildo Meireles.

By stacking 4 varieties of Fairy detergent, Hill creates a ready made color gradient. I like that he describes it as “appropriated,” acknowledging the package design to some degree. When artists use consumer packaged goods in this context, it’s sort of “have your cake and eat it too” situation. Clearly a critique on consumer culture, and yet exploiting whatever subliminal forces of attraction these (designed) objects may inherently possess. This was equally true for Warhol and other artists who have appropriated consumer packaging in this way.


Fairys, 2010 (“Appropriated ready made washing liquid”)


Horizon, 2011 (“Customised fabric conditioner containers”)

Below, an excerpt from a video about the Catlin Prize which Hill received in 2011…

(And a bit more, after the fold…)

(more…)

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