packaging as content

May 17, 2012

Nigel Sense’s Annotated Label Paintings

Budweiser, Stella Artois, Toohey’s Blue

Another annotated Budweiser label (on left) led me to the paintings of Nigel Sense.

As with Wacky Packs, the beer labels here provide a loose framework for satirical commentary, but in Sense’s paintings the content is nearly always about artists. (And sometimes about the economics of his art career choices—fine arts versus commercial art, graphic design, etc.)

Hence a Budweiser label becomes Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Stella Artois label is about Marcel Duchamp, and an Australian Toohey’s Beer label is revised as a comment on Australian artist Brett Whiteley. (I had to look that one up.)

Interesting to compare this video with the video in the previous post: two tattooed artists who created artworks changing the Budweiser beer label, each of whom emphasizes the role that personal experience has played in their work.

(A few more package-related Nigel Sense paintings, 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 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…)

March 30, 2012

Nickolas Muray’s Plastic Containers

Nickolas Muray: Plastics, Plastic Containers, 1960

1960 Carbro color still lifes of plastic packaging by Nickolas Muray.

Lately we’ve been endlessly photographing, silhouetting and retouching plastic bottles, both as props for other products and as subjects in their own right.

I ought to be sick of the sight of them, but the plastic bottles in these photographs by Nickolas Muray are lit like objects in a Vermeer painting and I like the way they’re arranged.

In the photo above, the bottles are cropped, left and right, so that the viewer imagines an extended (endless?) parade of brands.

In contrast, the same bottles (more or less) in the photograph below, are all contained within the image.

Nickolas Muray: Plastics, Plastic Containers, 1960

After the market crash, Murray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and become a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for his creation of many of the conventions of color advertising. He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Nickolas Muray

These later works were done five years before his death in 1965. (Photographs via: George Eastman House)

(Another, of his more fantastical, plastic bottle still lifes, 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…)

December 30, 2011

Camouflage Package Design Continued

Lest anyone imagine that camouflage patterns were confined only to beverage packaging, here are some recent examples of camouflage package design, in general.

Because of its star logo, Amour Star seems ready-made for a patriotic camouflage treatment, although it’s debatable how American a “Vienna Sausage” can ever be. (Designed by Bob Oliva)

Jiffy Pop, too, has undergone camouflage treatment. (Via: Lester Of Puppets’s Flickr Photostream)

“Powderflage” powder concealer comes in a camouflage canister. (Note how its camo pattern is made of butterflies.)

Srixon’s camouflaged USO golf balls pack, we’ve mentioned before.

Yoder’s canned bacon comes in a camouflage patterned can.

“A Bathing Ape” (aka: BAPE) has for a while featured camouflage patterns in its branding.

And Huggie’s diapers have also supported our troops through camouflage patterning.

Also: camouflage candy…

and camouflage peanuts, for some reason.

(and one more example, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 16, 2011

Clown Cereal

Clown cereal boxes (Kellogg’s, General Mills & Post) were, I think, all from Dan Goodsell’s Flickr Photostream

My early childhood was spent in Sarasota, Florida, home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

While clowns have been culturally waning for some time now, in those days, there was a show called “Circus Boy” on television (starring a young Micky Dolenz who grew up to become the Monkee‘s drummer) and there were lots of circus-themed packages at the grocery store. Not yet scary, clowns were still considered a good way to market children’s cereals.

Why the sudden interest in clowns, you ask?

(Asked and answered, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 15, 2011

Dan Witz: Bar Shrine Paintings

“Shrine” (I’ve also seen this painting titled as “Bar”) 2006, 68×40 oil and mixed media on canvas

Dan Witz (mentioned in yesterday’s post) was one of several roommates that I shared a low-ceilinged, South Street Seaport loft with in the late 1970s.

I like his paintings of liquor bottles. The one above from 2006 seems to have two different titles: “Bar” and “Shrine.” His later liquor bottle paintings from 2010 seem to have combined these two titles into “Bar Shrine.”

I can find nothing online to suggest that it’s intentional, but the painting above looks like a skull to me. A subliminal vanitas symbol for a splendid array of liquor choices? (Death-as-bartender: “Name your poison!”)

Bar Shrine #2 Triptych, 2010, 56" x 84" oil and digital media on canvas

(One more “Bar Shrine” painting, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 14, 2011

Ron English: Popaganda Shopdropping

Ron English is the artist who created the zipper/banana album cover mash-up that we wrote about last January.

More recently he’s been doing some cereal box package design (i.e.: art) which he’s been shopdropping into supermarkets. These “popaganda” food repacks are subversive in the same dumb sort of way that Wacky Packages were: creating momentary consumer confusion and adding a satiric, negative spin to trademarked food brands.

Some commentators have taken the cereal series as nutritional agitprop in opposition of childhood obesity. I’m not sure that English’s agenda is so politically correct, but I could be wrong.

The fun part of shopdropping, however, is when consumers puzzle over the aberrant branding messages and, in some cases, blithely purchase them.

Part of the reason I prefer not think that English’s messaging is sincerely literal is the “Sugar Diabetic Bear” below, which in my (diabetic) view is amusing, but not entirly accurate. Yes, Type 2 diabetes can be brought on by obesity, but what about Type 1 diabetes? Eating sugar certainly didn’t cause my diabetes. (See: Diabetes Myths)

(One more thing about Ron English and diabetes, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 6, 2011

Nozzle Necklaces

Upper left: Sterling silver “Spray Can Nozzle” pendant from Solitary Man ($255); upper right: Nozzle Necklace w/ Krylon logo cut out of a can by Jaymeer, 1997 (see also: Silver Nozzle); lower left: Hand-made clogged nozzle necklace by Steven Jacobs ($15); lower right: Sterling silver “Tag’n Run” necklaces—with and without diamond from Red Sofa ($65)

Some packaging jewelry of a very specific type: necklaces made from spray paint can nozzles.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 25, 2011

Spray Paint Can Concepts

Part of the Canceptual V.4 show at Crewest was devoted to Man One’s collaboration with Berlin Packaging’s Studio One Eleven, “Paint the Future” envisioning alternate spray paint cans:

“One of our strengths lies in understanding and implementing experiential design — that is, how people actually use and interact with a package. Man One Design asked us to apply that expertise to provide a vision for paint delivery systems that suit the needs of street artists,” said Scott Jost, Berlin Packaging Vice President of Innovation and Design. “These ideas open a dialogue that can help pave the way for equipping graffiti artists with better tools.”

“Street art is becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for brands to connect with younger consumers, but artists are limited by the capabilities of the conventional spray can. We asked Studio One Eleven to take an exploratory journey with us to think differently about the spray can and suggest ways to improve can performance,” said Scott Power, Managing Principal, Man One Design. “Our goal with the ‘Paint the Future’ showcase is to inspire and facilitate packaging innovation by asking a professional artist and heavy utilizer of spray paint like Man One what he wants and needs from a spray can to create his artwork. This is a path to discover new and meaningful value that translates into strategic opportunities for paint manufacturers.”

Berlin Packaging

Graffiti as “strategic opportunity” despite hardware stores keeping cans of spray paint in locked cabinets to discourage tagging.

Note concepts above for: accordion cartridge feature, a rocket shaped can and duplex spray can.

(More photos, after the fold…)

(more…)

October 24, 2011

Canceptual

On left: “Knuck Can” by Waxer; on right: “Spray Bomb” by Brian Lynk

Canceptual v.4 is an art show of spray paint cans at Crewest in Los Angeles that ends tomorrow.

(See also: You Can Go Your Own Way and Can-Gun)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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 4, 2011

Jonna Pedersen:
Product Stories & the Inner Lives of Packaging

As branding experts tell it, “narrative marketing” is the best way to sell something. “Tell the product’s story,” they say, “and consumers will listen.” But whatever story the brand chooses to tell, there are other, more personal stories that consumers will also hear.

Danish painter, Jonna Pedersen, explaining her recent focus on packaging, says, “To me, the outside says something about the inside. It’s all about reading the barcode.”

A product logo can unleash half-forgotten memories and sensations. We have all had this experience. Expressing the zeitgeist, consumer products can become cultural icons. Product graphics and packaging obviously matter. Visual impact and narrativity characterize those products that are deemed “classic.”

…A consumer product’s iconography is always ambiguous… A product’s packaging inherently carries a visual or textual content signaling what’s inside. There is no controlling the meanings and values that the consumer subsequently attributes to the product. That is entirely dependent on an individual’s baggage and frames of reference. In principle, the product is open to uncontrollable added meanings.

… Jonna Pedersen’s stories about consumer goods are more than representations of actual objects. They are images of our time. Familiar objects from our cultural heritage are interpreted and painted: graphic imprints and sensual experiences with numerous cultural, social and geographical references. Images of uniquely Danish products alongside images of exotic products, Greek olives or American ketchup, tell a story about an upheaval in Danish (food) culture.

Excerpts from Bente Jensen’s essay, “Product Stories”
from the book Documentary, Jonna Pedersen: Painting

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 13, 2011

Uncapped Landfill Jar #4

Musterole: Before & After. Not the usual “before & after” package redesign photos. The photo on left (by Rick Schies) and my photo (on the right) shows what the small white jar looked like “before”—migrating from its uncapped landfill to Dead Horse Bay Beach—and “after.”

Early advertising below shows that this jar originally came in a box.

Another Musterole ad from 1913 touted the clean whiteness of the jar:

“You get this clean, white ointment out of a clean, white jar. You simply rub it on—and the pain is gone!”

Smearing Mustard on the Skin, by Roger M. Grace
2005, Metroplitan News Company

(One more early Musterole ad, after the fold…)

(more…)

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