packaging as content

August 22, 2011

Geografia’s Polyhedral Planet

We went to Gift Fair last week (NYIGF) and one of the booths where I lingered the longest belonged to Geografia, a company that makes polyhedral paper globe kits, among other things.

When I saw the cube-shaped globe, above left, I said, “I bet that‘s a magic cube.” Sure enough the “Earth & Sky Twistable Globe” was a fully-functioning, folding and unfolding “magic cube” made from 8 smaller cubes—(the same sort of cube as our own Gumball Cube Pack).

In one state, the “Twistable Globe” shows a map of the world. Turned inside-out, it shows a map of the stars. (Really like the inside-outside / introvert-extrovert idea of this.)

Another intriguing reversible globe was their “Lands & Nations Flippable Globe” which was very similar to Jessica Comin’s “laranja mecánica” that we looked at recently. In her case, the cube could be turned inside-out to form a rhombic dodecahedron. The “Flippable Globe” is a cube that can be turned inside-out to form a regular dodecahedron. And its parts are tabbed, rather than permanently hinged together.

The projection of maps onto polyhedral shapes is something that Buckminster Fuller and others have also explored, but Geografia’s products manage to provide fascinating new polyhedral perspectives and (geo)graphic insights.

Here’s a video showing one of their “Sectional Globes” being assembled…

(We’ll be featuring more stuff from Gift Fair over the next week or two.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 7, 2011

Polyhedral Pineapple

Very appealing, pineapple-shaped package by Victor Branding Lab uses three hexagonal antiprism boxes in a polypropylene bag. (For TK Food’s pineapple pastry) Via: Lovely Package

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 26, 2011

Plain Cigarette Packaging

Expanding on Australia’s “plain cigarette packaging” initiative (under which all cigarette packaging would be made generic), Jennifer Noon & Sarah Shaw have envision anti-ergonomic, trapezoidal packs:

“Our primary aim was to change the structure of the pack making it less ergonomic. The pack was developed to be difficult to use and carry, it is hard to fit into pockets due to its triangular shape and the angled inner means the cigarettes are hard to get out. The lid is designed so that it closes efficiently but after a few uses it becomes weak, meaning the cigarettes can fall out if being stored in a ladies handbag.

We decided to use an off putting colour on the outer of the pack choosing a yellow green which was identified to have negative connotations. We then added a mould texture to really emphasise the disgusting feel of the pack and reduce the glamour appeal for young people.”

The idea of deliberately engineering a “weak” lid is interesting… like planned obsolescence, but for a good cause.

Note: the alternating right-side-up / up-side-down close-packing arrangement…

…and a rare example of “open mouth” packs that feature human mouths, rather than cute animal mouths.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 21, 2011

2 Oranges: Geometry, Packaging & Ultaviolence

Violent, polyhedral orange chocolate packaging—two kinds:

1. Jessica Comin’s “laranja mecánica” chocolate package (based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange) starts out as a rhombic-dodecahedron which can be turned inside out to form a cube. Although the book and the movie made “ultraviolence” a household word, Comin’s packaging concept is violent only to the extent that one empathizes with a box being turned inside out. (via)

One remarkable thing about her transformable pack, is that both shapes—a cube and a rhombic-dodecahedron—will “close pack.” In fact, the rhombic-dodecahedron was the one close-packing shape that I was still on the lookout for. (The other four close-packing polyedrons with regular faces were already accounted for.)

Like our own interactive Gumball cube-pack, “laranja mecánica” is a novel candy package holding a minimal amount of candy. I figure, only 6 chocolate eyeballs, assuming that one goes into each of the 6 pyramid shaped compartments below.

A similar polyhedral model was constructed by W. W. Ross in the late 1800s. His “Exploded Cube” (below) is part of The University of Arizona’s collection of his dissected wooden polyhedrons.

And there’s an animated illustration from Apollonius Math showing how this transformation works…

2. Terry’s Chocolate Oranges (below) also involve polyhedral dissection, but, in Terry’s case, it’s a sphere of chocolate that gets dissected along longitudinal lines.

As for the violence, it’s implicit in the “whack & unwrap” instructions. Many of their television commercials have fun with exaggerating the violence required to open the package. Interesting to note that, in the photo above, the foil-wrapped chocolate orange, was, itself, packaged in a clamshell—the very thing that “wrap rage” was named for.

(The “violent” Whack & Unwrap campaign, after the fold…)

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May 18, 2011

Interlocking Bottles

Two similar designs for interlocking bottles:

On left: Karim Rashid’s 2003 “Pour Hommes 2 in 1” for Issey Miyake (Men).

On right: Joy Lin’s 2011 envisioned redesign for a Hustler lubricant set.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 17, 2011

Magic Folding Cans

Aside from yesterday’s example, most “magic folding cubes” are not packages, although some of them are designed to resemble packaging.

And among the various “magic folding cube” structures are topologically-similar cylindrical versions, sometimes called “magic cans” …

(More photos and video, after the fold…)

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May 16, 2011

Gumball Cube Pack

Seeing projects like Sophie Valentine’s “Capitalism vs. Socialism” and Regina Rebele’s 2008 “Type-Cube” made me wonder if there was a practicable way that this type of “magic folding cube” could be designed as a box to actually contain something.

Ideally, I would have liked it best if the whole thing—all 8 boxes with tucks & glue flaps—could have been folded from a single die-cut shape. That doesn’t appear to be possible, although it was easy enough to get it down to just 4 pieces which must then be hinged together.

But what sort of product should such a package contain? Gumballs, I decided. Stupid, I guess, to envision such an elaborate package for such an inexpensive product, but demographically appropriate as a candy pack for kids. Like something that Topps might have considered doing in the 1970s. And as our video clearly shows, these gumballs really needed to be contained.

Anyway, this is just Gumball Cube-Pack Mach 1. There are some further structural improvements I have in mind to try next. (If you’re listening, Topps, please give us call. We’d love to hook you up.)

(Some still photos, after the fold…)

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April 25, 2011

Muffets: Son of Shredded Wheat

In addition to the cereal cup shown at the end of last Thursday’s post, another food that Scott H. Perky (son of Shredded Wheat inventor, Henry D. Perky) invented was “Muffets: The Round Shredded Wheat.” (AKA: “The All-Year-Round Cereal”)

I was twelve when shredded wheat was born, and worked and played in father’s laboratory. I grew up under the influence of his enthusiasms, worked in every department of his factory, made some inventions of my own, and in 1920 invented Muffets. Now I am, myself, conservatively but with great hopes, introducing what I consider the first new departure since my father’s in the line of popular “cereals.”

Scott H. Perky
from a letter to the editor,
Time Magazine, Jan. 21, 1929

Just as Henry Perky’s Shredded Wheat Company was eventually bought out by Nabisco, so too was son, Scott Perky’s Muffets Brand bought out by Quaker Oats.

This 1930s hexagonal box (via Worthpoint) must be one of the earliest versions of the Quaker Oats Muffets box. A package design with a number interesting features:

a. It’s a close-packing hexagonal prism.

b. It has a faux die-cut window revealing a trompe l’oeil illustration of the product contained within.

c. The biscuits illustration also serves as an orthographic diagram of the package contents (albeit from just one angle).

d. At one end of the box there is a seal-of-approval type graphic burst, guaranteeing that “if you do not agree that these are the best whole wheat biscuits you have ever used we shall gladly remit the cost of this package.”

e. On the bottom panel (not pictured here) the ingredients are listed: “Whole Wheat, Irradiated Dry Yeast. Each Biscuit provides 50% of the Minimum Daily Requirement of Vitamin D”

In 1923, Harry Steenbock and James Cockwell discovered exposure to ultraviolet light increased the Vitamin D concentration in food. After discovering that irradiated rat food cured the rats of rickets, Steenbock sought a patent. Steenbock then assigned the patent to the newly established Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. WARF then licensed the technology to Quaker Oats for use in their breakfast cereals.

from Wikipedia’s entry on the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

According to Wikipedia, “Irradiated food does not become radioactive, but in some cases there may be subtle chemical changes…”

At the other end of the box is a serving tip about how you can cut out the centers to use the biscuits as “patty shells.” Nowhere on the package do the words “breakfast” or “cereal” appear.

(Some later versions of Quaker Oats Muffets packaging, 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…)

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February 7, 2011

McSweeney’s Head Box

Recently spotted at Barnes & Nobel: Issue No. 36 of McSweeney’s Quarterly—a “head box” with illustrations by Matt Furie. (Note: Illustration on bottom of box shows that this is actually a severed head box.)

This package features the kind of orthographic graphic design we’ve discussed before, but usually it’s the contents of the box that are projected onto the side panels. Here, it’s more like a “serving suggestion” of what you might make of the box’s contents—(your head being the presumptive destination of the ideas contained).

But besides serving as a repository for literary contents, an orthographically projected head also makes a nice diagram to explain our human predisposition toward rectangular, Cartesian coordinates. With eyes facing forward, an ear on either side, it’s only natural we navigate the world in egocentric, rectangular directions: forward, backward, left, right, up, down.

In an earlier post about close-packing polyhedrons, I wondered why packaging so often seems to skew rectangular. Egocentric coordinates could be one explanation. Our skulls may be round, but our ideas are definitely square.

The video below shows what’s in the box.
(The sound track is: “Poodle in the Hen House”)

(See also: Skull Bottles and Our Family of Products)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

January 14, 2011

Toblerone Fractal Pack

Another inherently fractal display pack: the “Toblerone Bulk Candies” box by Ducart Packaging Industries. Prism-shaped box containing prism-shaped candies.

The individual candies, however, are in wrapper-packets rather than their trademark triangular boxes. Which is probably less expensive, but (sadly) serves to make the whole package a little less self-similar.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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

January 11, 2011

Karma, Coincidence & Container Corporation of America

Recently discovered two things:

1. Bob Caruthers’ Flickr set called “Similarities”…

The pairs of images in this “Similarities” set are similar visually in one way or another. They are presented without judgment as to the motives of their creators. The viewers of the pieces can form their own opinion(s) about what they see.

Caruthers goes on to define 5 different motives:

Some are “accidents”: The creator of the similar piece had no knowledge of the original.

Some are “re-contextualized”: Obscure imagery from long forgotten sources was used.

Some are “inspired”: They are either obviously or vaguely similar to one another.

Some are “homages”: In order to pay homage to an existing piece, the original design should be widely known.

Some are “appropriated”: They contain—as the primary image on their piece—the original (and usually, but not always, uncredited) visual source.

I like this separated-at-birth sort of thing and I do something similar here—although, usually when I show a pair of images together on boxvox, it’s because of a shared underlying concept rather than a similar layout.

Caruthers very charitably presents his Similarities “without judgment.” But really, even when we aspire to take the higher (non-judgmental) ground, the question of precedence and originality is still very much on our minds.

Reading over his list of motives, the least problematic (in my view) are the “accidental” similarities. For this explanation to be plausible, however, the similar examples must represent either (A) a pretty obvious idea or (B) a “great minds think alike” situation. Which brings us to my second recent discovery:

2. Container Corporation of America’s 1938 logo —(if the box below the fist in the black & white ad from Fortune Magazine can be considered their logo)— looks an awful lot like our Beach Packaging Design logo, (also used sideways for this blog).

Are the comparisons made here on boxvox odius? Is it karma that I should now have to ask myself whether our logo is just a really obvious idea or one of those a “great minds think alike” situations?

A little from column A and a little from column B…

I like the simple geometry of this kind of isometric perspective, but clearly I’m not the only one to ever notice that a regular hexagon can represent a box (and that two equilateral triangle can represent the inside of an open box). And, like many other package-related companies, our logo is one of those package-containing, pictorial logos. All of this goes (obviously) in column A.

As for column B, since the similarities here are accidental, and we had no prior knowledge of this particular CCA ad from Fortune magazine—and given that CCA was well known for hiring the most genius graphic designers (Paul Rand, Saul Bass, etc.)—I don’t think the coincidence reflects too poorly on us.

The black & white “Unity” ad, above, was by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre. Would I sound too much like Wile E. Coyote, (delusional) super-genius, if I were to suggest that this was a great-minds-think-alike situation?

(Asked and answered, 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

November 22, 2010

Back in the Boxes

Packaging for two products, each called “Back in the Box”

1. Back in the Box™ by Classic Games Company was a packing puzzle in which 17 tetrahedra of various sizes are fit back into a cube-shaped box.

Despite rectangular box inside, the shape of the package is more exotic. Appears to be rectangular box with one corner truncated to make a triangular top flap. A rare example of polyhedral puzzle packaging reflecting its unusually shaped contents, the truncated corner simulates the shape of the tetrahedrons inside. (Photos, on right and above, left are from Baxter Web Puzzles)

2. “Back in the Box” the 1994 seven-song "David Byrne" CD: design and photography by Deborah Norcross.

I like the blurry photo of the little box, and of course I want to know, what did it once contain that we are now meant to imagine going back in the box?

Note: track one is parenthetically entitled, “Vox in the Box mix”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 19, 2010

Naef Packaging

Yesterday’s exploration of nested packaging leads us inevitably back to subject of nesting toys and to German mathematician, Peer Clahsen’s “Cella.” (Designed for Naef in 1979) Again, these are like Matryoshka dolls—only more modern and geometric. As with the early Rubik’s cubes, the products are fascinating, but it’s also interesting to check out the graphic design of the original packaging.

I like the multicolored Naef logo with the stacked “a” and “e”—which seems related to Naef’s building block products, but in in a subtle way.

Naef’s version of a Rubik’s Cube

(Some videos of “Cella” & another Naef nesting toy, plus more vintage packaging, after the fold…)

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September 23, 2010

The Incomplete Package: Part of a Larger Whole

We’ve already featured a few of Robert Brownjohn’s ground-breaking graphic design ideas.

Here’s another one: the package is just a small part of a larger whole—(i.e.: the display.)

By itself, the package and its message may seem truncated and incomplete, but lined up in a row or stacked one on top of the other, a bigger picture emerges.

During his time as partner at Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, Brownjohn is credited with designing the 1959 proposed packaging for “Wash Up!” moist towelettes, above.

Among the designs in BCG’s portfolio was a package for 'Wash-up' cubes… with a quirky typographic wrapping. Individually they are hard to read, but stacked one of top of another, the message is clear.

Emily King
Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography: 1925-1970 Life and Work

For rectangular boxes, applying this technique is often a simple matter of letting the type—(or photo, or graphics, etc.)—wrap around a corner. Seen by itself, at a 3/4 angle, everything is visible and perfectly legible. Judiciously stacked together, each box can be made to complete the cropped panel of its adjoining neighbor.

These “You Complete Me” packs are not really incomplete, but one at a time, in isolation, they may be hard to fully comphehend.

Top row: 1973-74 Poloroid packaging by Paul Giambarba; 2nd row, left: the Andy Warhol-style bottle illustrations by Design Laboratory at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art & Design join at the corners when displayed in a group (via: The Dieline); oon right: Maikiibox packaging for USB pendrives (via: Packaging of the World); 3rd row, left: on right: Guzman Gastronomia boxes by Marnich & Associates with super-graphic, wrap-around typography (via: Lovely Package); on right: Minute Maid cartons by Duffy & Partners and CMA Brand Presence; 4th row, left: Colin Dunn’s vitamin packaging; on right: packaging for Mesoestetic’s line of men’s skin products by Espulga + Associates—these boxes have numerals that wrap around a corner, although their photos here are slightly misleading (upper photo shows two “1” boxes & two “2” boxes in a row, while lower photo shows single “1” & “2” boxes, shot at an angle); bottom row: Comtech light bulb packaging by ONY (via: Lovely Package)

Surprisingly, a similar idea is sometimes attempted with cylindrical bottles and cans…

(Cylindrical completion, after the fold…)

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