packaging as content

January 25, 2012

Ceci n’est pas une Skippers pipe

Jonna Perdersen (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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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March 22, 2011

Vincent Pacheco’s Cigarette Pack Paintings

Portraits of cigarette packs by artist & graphic-designer, Vincent Pacheco.
(via: MKTG)

(A few more package-related paintings by Pacheco, after the fold…)

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March 17, 2011

Auction House Packaging

A long time ago I worked in the advertising department of Christie’s auction house, where it fell to us to design their magazine ads and catalog covers, etc. There was also a photo department where they took photographs of the consigned artworks.

As we near the end of our double week of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—(scraping the bottom of the bowl?)—we are again resorting to Pop Art. These two photographs, each showing an arrangement of Warhol’s shipping cartons (including the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes type) are from the two major competing auction houses: Christie’s above and Sotheby’s, on right.

Neither of these packaging arrangements are the type you would see at the supermarket. In a retail setting (of course) the stacked display would be retail packages, rather than shipping cartons and they would most likely be all the same brand. Maybe you would see this sort of thing in some unusually haphazard grocery store stockroom? I don’t know. I never worked in a grocery.

What the two photos do show is the variability of permissible arrangements that these sculptures may be placed in. These two competitors are each offering nearly identical collections—although the Sotheby’s collection does contain an added Del Monte carton—but their “product photos” are very different.

Christie’s, here went in for the sort of “casually flung” arrangement suggesting a communing between the different brands. like a arrangement of furniture to help facilitate conversation.

Sotheby’s arrangement is the more daring, I think. Their boxes are displayed at alternating angles in a single stack—a pop art version of Brâncuşi’s endless column.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 16, 2011

UPC as Package Proxy

While I’m not that into all of Bernard Solco’s creative output (His “pop” portraits of celebrities seem to skew Republican.) I do like these UPC prints from his “Symbology” series.

Does the barcode on the wall, serve as a proxy for a decoratively-problematic corn flakes package? Pop Art for people with Minimalist sensibilities?

Although Solco does go to considerable effort to put his work in a Pop Art context:

All editions are printed by the artist and Alexander Heinrici in his studio in NYC. Heinrici is a “Master Printer” whose expertise was also utilized by Andy Warhol for the Campbell’s soup can series…

Top left: Welch’s Grape Jelly Print; on right: Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Print; lower left: Fedex Code Print; on right: Kodak Film Print

It’s easy to imagine how Solco’s blending of abstraction and brand-specificity might appeal to corporate art collections…

“Bernard Solco has painted more than 60 UPC Barcode Paintings for private and corporate collectors such as Kodak, America Online, and Tim Smucker.”

…but the general public has also embraced this sort of thing—barcodes, and other opaque symbols, as fashion and decor. (See: Consumed Column, Style Decoder)

Why is this? These codes may contain all sorts of data, but the information is not readily accessible to the naked eye. Yes, barcodes & QR codes can be scanned and decoded with the right smart phone app, but that doesn’t explain their popularity as decorative patterns.

I think it’s precisely because we can’t just read their information that they are popular. Unlike a television commercial whose commercial message you involuntarily absorb, encoded information you don’t have to receive unless (for some reason) you want to.

Until decoded, these are just abstract patterns and you get to remain blissfully ignorant of any content they might contain. (Unless its meaning is explicitly spelled out, as it is in Solco’s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes UPC)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 4, 2011

Georgina Luck’s Spattered Packagings

And on the subject of messy packaging … Lately, I‘ve been seeing Georgina Luck’s illustrations of food packaging appearing on other package-related blogs and I’m happy to join the pack.

I like the explosive Ralph Steadman style spatter she employs—(example of Steadman’s style)—but seeing it applied to pictures of packaging, the effect is different.

Each of her packages appears to have been rendered with a singular splat onto the page. While “linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown” may ultimately lead back to Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism—in this context, with this subject matter, it looks as if the contents in each container could not be contained. Not that this failure of containers to actually contain is necessarily a bad thing. Here, as with the spatters & drips on packaging mentioned yesterday, the messiness of the package seems to signal succulent contents.

Also cool that she chose to feature the Royal Baking Powder can—the clearest and most direct example of a Droste effect package that I know of.

(Another photo from Georgina Luck’s blog, after the fold…)

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March 1, 2011

Paul McCarthy’s Ketchup Brand(s)

When I first saw the photo of “Daddies Tomato Ketchup” on left, I thought it must be fictitious product, invented by artist, Paul McCarthy. It turns out to be a real brand, apparently owned by Heinz. (Heinz ketchup is another brand sometimes used as a medium in McCarthy’s artwork.)

Photo on right is a detail from “Ketchup Sandwich” an installation in which layers of Heinz ketchup are spread between layers of glass. (Photo from minimapedalia’s Flickr Photostream)

Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy’s main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them.

(from Wikipedia’s entry on Paul McCarthy)

In McCarthy’s oeuvre, there is particular emphasis on the mess made by ketchup. And although he uses various foods as a proxy for bodily fluids he says, “there is a big difference between ketchup and blood.”

Below is McCarthy’s Daddies Tomato Ketchup Inflatable, 2007

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

February 15, 2011

More Drips

More drip/droplet packaging. Following up on an earlier post about this trend, I’m seeing more examples…

1. Magic marker brand, Krink is doing the Absolut Vodka thing, on left—thereby making the connection between packaging drips and graffiti absolutely explicit. (via: PopSop)

2. The single golden drip featured on Moruba’s label design for Karey Olive Oil (center) is more an illustration of package contents and about as far from expressionistic graffiti style as you can get. Have to admire the astute typographic insight that enabled the designer to see the discreet teardrop that was always latent in that sideways “y.” (via: the dieline)

3. Mystery packs: I don’t know where I found the blue-yellow-red bath set bottles, on right. I have lost track of my source. (If anyone knows, please tell me; I don’t like making them anonymous.) The dripping paper collar loops that cover the caps and tuck-in are interesting. The connotations here (for dripping primary colors) seem to be more painterly—less “street art.”

(A video of the Krink/Absolut bottle, after the fold…)

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