packaging as content

August 24, 2011

Package Design on Your iPhone

Inexplicable drawn to Zero Gravity’s both at Gift Fair. When I saw some of their package-design iPhone cases, I figured that’s what must have been calling to me. Not all of their phone cases are designed to resemble consumer packaged goods, but enough so that it raises some questions. We’ve seen other cases of devices being made to look like packaging… cameras, radios and, yes, telephones.

But since Apple is unlikely to come out with cross-branded varieties of iPhone, if you are determined to possess a Velveeta iPhone, it falls to 3rd party venders of iPhone accessories to meet your needs.

Of course, there are also other package-related iPhone cases with different degrees of DIY.

Joanna Behar was experimenting with a candy-branded iPhone—(candy wrappers placed underneath a transparent iPhone case)…

In both of these examples—Zero Gravity’s faux-packaging and Johanna Behar’s DIY candy branding—the glossy plastic surface belies any sincere intention to fool the eye. These are still coveted hi-tech gadgets—with a glossy veneer of ironic low-brow branding.

Another DIY example: “Randomly Ross” has a Flickr Photostream about making iPhone cases from juice boxes and also offers them for sale on ArtBoxe.

Here’s a case in which the packaging cover serves a more truly undercover role:

“I was trying to find a material to make a case for electronic devices that would be durable, but not attract attention. Truth be told, the thing that first attracted me to juice-boxes is that they are ubiquitous and uninteresting. If someone looks into your purse and sees a book, some keys and a juice box, they aren't going to take the juice box. What if they see a brand new iPhone?”

In titling this post, it struck me how “Package Design on Your iPhone” could be interpreted two ways: as a covering to put on your iPhone and as an activity to do on your iPhone. Then I wondered, is there an app for that?

And I’m not the first pose the question. (See: Richard Shear’s Free iPhone package design app)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

August 12, 2011

Writing on Packages

While technocentric consumer culture continues its swoon over QR code packaging and the branding dialogue that it supposedly opens, there may be another trend worth noting: writing on packages.

Earlier this Summer, I noticed this huge speech bubble on the back of a box of Special K and I thought, “What on earth is that for?”

Reading the back of the cereal box, I learned that the big blank area was part of their “What will you gain when you lose?” campaign — (i.e.: when you lose weight). Consumers are invited to answer that question by uploading a picture of themselves with what they were hoping to gain—their “goal”—written on their box of Special K.

The gallery page of photos on the Special K website discloses that “some of the images are of paid participants.” I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that the women seeking to gain “Sass” and “Pep” may be in that category. (See also: Pep Brands Packaging)

Of course with any interactive marketing push of this type, some consumers may push back, as illustrated by The Restless Mouse’s message in the lower right hand corner. Not the sort of affirmation Special K was seeking, but a more meaningful show of strength, perhaps, than the word “strength” compliantly written on a cereal box muscle.

Another example of the writing-on-packages trend is the Budweiser Light “Write-On Label”—here the campaign doesn’t require online consumer feedback, although they do allude to “social networking”…

(More about “Write-On Labels, etc., after the fold…)

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June 3, 2011

Older Guys with Record Player Cars (3 Kinds)

While looking at engine-shaped recordings, I noticed that there were three kinds of record-player car:

A. cars with built-in record players…

The video does not show this car’s owner, but I consider bandleader, Lawrence Welk to be the spiritual father of the onboard car record-player. (Since he appears in 1956 ads as a spokeman for the new gadget)

B. toy cars that play records…

There’s lots of “vinyl killer” commentary about this device but I like the appreciative “Record Runner” video from Grand Illusions the best. The gent demonstrating is Tim Rowett.

C. cars that are made out of record players…

This would make a better story, visually, if the record player parts that Martin Gutierrez Sandoval had used to customize his VW were more signifying of record players—like say the turntables or the stylus arms—but whatever part that is that he had 2,470 of (by the time he had retired from the Gerrard record player factory) they do give his ultra-ventilated car, a delicately lacy look.

Interesting that 2 out of 3 of our record-player cars are VW. (See Also: Volkswagen Box)

About the older guys: the only question in my mind is “Which kind do I want to be?”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 25, 2011

Climax Catsup

Photo from eBay: “Climax Catsup” bottle from the Loudon Packing Company. (for some reason, this bottle is available from the same seller for either $12.34 or $35.00)

With the enactment of the Pure Food & Drug act in 1906, Catsup manufacturers were drawing fire for labels that claimed their Catsups were made from “Pure Ripen Tomatos” but in most cases were actually made “from a filthy, decomposed and putrid vegetable substance and from tomato pulp screened from peelings and cores.” (The Law of Pure Food and Drug by William Wheeler Thornton)

Charles F. Loudon’s factory in Terre Haute, Indiana (where Climax Catsup was bottled) played a pivotal role in changing all that.

The first two products bottled at Loudon’s Terre Haute facility were “Climax Catsup” and “Loudon’s Catsup.” … To prevent contamination, cookers were glass-lined and the pipes were porcelain-lined.

… With little government control over labeling or content, catsup, or “ketchup” as it was called by many manufacturers, consisted of just about anything.

…As early as 1882, national periodicals warned consumers to avoid using commercial ketchup.

…No one in the catsup industry was more active in promoting fine tomato products than Loudon. In 1902, he submitted a carefully documented paper… addressing the need for preservatives in the manufacture of catsup.

Loudon reported he had tried to make preservative-free catsup but received complaints from grocers regarding fermentation soon after opening. As a result, he urged the association to adopt guidelines for the use of harmless preservatives.

… [he advocated] the use of benzoates as preservatives. He was supported by other major ketchup manufacturers, including H.J. Heinz Co., Richard J. Evans and Glenn Mason.

Harvey Wiley, chief of chemistry division at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, disagreed. … Dr. Wiley believed benzoates were dangerous…

Wiley enlisted two scholars to discover how to produce a preservative-free catsup: Dr. Arval Bitting… and an associate Katherine Golden.

…In 1907, the Bittings asked if they could use the Loudon Packing’s Terre Haute plant — reputed to be the most modern in the U.S. — to conduct their experiments. The Bittings were extremely impressed with “the Loudon method.”

(Excerpt continues, after the fold…)

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December 16, 2010

Packaging & Orthographic Graphic Design

I used to think of orthographic projection strictly as drafting technique: those technical drawings, by which any 3-dimensional object could be described in 3–6 views.

In recent years, however, I’ve noticed it turning up as a packaging scheme (see: Mac G5 box, on right) and it does make a certain sense as a way of clearly indicating what’s in the box.

In packaging, as in mechanical drawing, 3 views are usually sufficient to describe most objects. In Art Lebedev’s Paliha-750 telephone carton, however, he has chosen to feature all six, “You can look at it from all sides, while it’s still inside the box.”

Having the outside of a box so closely correspond with the product it contains, makes the packaging function almost as a proxy. Holding the box, the consumer is, in effect, holding a trompe l’oeil product replica. Each panel serves as a diagram of what’s just below the surface. Almost as if the box was invisible and you were seeing right though it. In situations where an actual die window is not feasible, it’s a pretty neat trick.

Above, Marc Brownlow’s automotive light bulb pack:

Packaging system for a specialty aftermarket automotive company. The package uses orthographic “x-ray” views of the bulbs in lieu of clear “windows” to minimize cost.

Another light bulb packaging project, this one by Oliver Meier, also uses orthographic projection. (via: Packaging of The World)

David Graas’s “Not a Box” package clearly shows an orthographic projection of a hanging light with a round shade, but the joke here is that the cube-shaped box is itself the shade and the light is emitted through the misleading lines of the diagram.

The Heliotropium bottle by CPDS is a similar bait and switch. The box shows orthographic projections of a traditional ornate perfume bottle, but inside the box, the bottle is actually box-shaped. (via: the Dieline)

Internationally it was decided to “hide” a bottle. A bottle is in a bottle. The new hides in the previous. The bottle is a box, the box is a bottle. On each side of the box the bottle’s image, the image of it’s each side is placed. The box is designed in such a way when it opens, the drawn bottle opens too. And inside… inside there is other bottle, the real one.

(Some other examples, we’ve featured before, after the fold…)

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October 19, 2010

Fallout Shelter Packaging

Today we look at packaged food in family fallout shelters.

In the 1960s, rather than promising “a chicken in every pot” president Kennedy called for “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.”

In his book, Populuxe—(in the chapter entitled “Just Push The Button”)—Thomas Hine makes an interesting point about Kennedy’s proposal for building home fallout shelters: that it would privatize civil defense.

Kennedy’s program… would have transformed civil defense from a community-based responsibility to one that was carried out by individual suburban families. Air-raid shelters were hardly a new thing, but previously they had been group facilities which mobilized the solidarity people feel when faced by common adversity. Kennedy’s program, which was welcomed by the building materials and construction industries, foresaw the fallout shelter as yet another feature of the suburban home… And the family, not the community, became the key unit of survival. This was so clear a reflection of the way in which American society perceived itself at the time that the novelty of the approach was scarcely noticed.

But the part of the fallout shelter that I wish to focus on here, is the well-stocked 1960s pantry. (Click on the photo above for post-apocalyptical product placement of a number of surviving brandname foods: Campbell’s, Lipton, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Spam, etc.)

Better Homes and Gardens… identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe

The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:

…in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. … The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

(One more well-stocked fallout shelter, after the fold…)

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October 6, 2010

Space Station Packaging

Vintage ads envisioning space stations made from product packaging. I imagine there are other examples. (See: more about the conical Campari Soda bottle)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 3, 2010

Audio-Visual Packs

Antonio Papania-Davis draws on some enviable home-brewed electronics skills in his artworks and experimental gizmos. Above, are two versions of his Coke-can “micro-projectors.”

(An audio example, after the fold…)

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March 31, 2010

Old Fruit Jar Apps

Mason-jar egg-beaters.

Well-known as a DIY, food-preserving container, the mason jar was also the “universal machine” of its day. (In the same way that a computer or an “iPhone” is today’s universal machine.)

With its standardized closures, the mason jar served as the default platform for many 19th Century, third-party apps.

While we’ve already covered some of the more novel applications—(See: Mason Jar Mousetraps and Minnow Traps)—kitchen-related tools like egg-beaters are the more obvious application. (…and butter churns, mixers & coffee grinders, etc.) Inventors developed and patented lots of these
attachments—adding additional functions to the humble, “open source”
container.

If specialized, stand-alone kitchen-appliances hadn’t led us away from this concept, we might all have more kitchen counter space today.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 26, 2010

The CardTalk Cardboard Record Player

Further clarification on the cardboard record player: the earliest patent I could find for this concept appears to have been J. Jauquet’s “Pocket Speaking Devices” (on right) filed in 1953. Another more complicated, manually-operated, foldable record-player was J.S. Weiner’s “Sound Emitting Device”—patent applied for in 1967. The more recognizable version of the concept (on left) was from the “Record Player” patent of Max Meier-Maletz, applied for in 1972.

Global Record Network (GRN)—the Christian Missionary organization that was most responsible for the relative success of this version—claims that development of this design began around 1964. They call it the “CardTalk” and used it, not for music, but for religious indoctrination. The CardTalk was prominently featured in a documentary film about the history of GRN.

(3 cardboard record-player patents, after the fold…)

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March 22, 2010

Record Cover = Record Player

Now that hardly anyone owns a record player, record jackets today must also serve as their own record players. Hence: audio firm, GGRP’s
brilliant “cardboard record player” promotion.

Thank to Breno, who commented on the Dieline version of this post, we now know that this particular record-playing cardboard package was actually developed in the late 1960s by GRN, The Global Recording Network, a Christian missionary organization. (More about their CardTalk: here)

Using this package for GGRP’s promo was apparently the idea of Geoff Dawson, associate director
at Grey Vancouver
who handled GGRB’s re-branding. The self-sufficient packaging makes a
very low tech, yet audio-capable record player. According to Dawson,
“It’s actually shocking how good the sound quality is.”

The new promo pack also has its own 1950s-style promotional video.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 11, 2010

2 Animated Packaging Patents

Following up on the animated package thread—a couple of relevant patents. (lenticular/moiré and holographic)

First up, is Yoshi Sekiguchi’s “Process for Producing a Display with Movable Images” from 1994. The patent touches on both “lenticular” and “moiré” techniques. (See also: Kinegrams) His candy bar concept, above, is clearly a precedent for the recent Widex hearing-aid box, featured in our previous post. Sekguchi also envisioned lenticular animation used on other packaging, such as bottles and CD boxes.

(The holographic patent follows, after the fold…)

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March 3, 2010

Packaging Clocks as “Life-Controlling Machines”

From Tim Hawkinson’s “Secret Sync” project: a Coke can and a Colgate Toothpaste tube, made to function as clocks.

… on the tube of toothpaste, the paste extrusion shows the minutes and the open cap shows the hours; the pull tab on the Coke can counts the minute and the sipping hole counts the hour.

…. Humans have an external relationship with clocks, because they rely on them to maintain the patterns and schedules of their lives. The purpose of a clock is not to make humans rethink their reality, but to preserve it. Yet, Hawkinson’s clocks push these conceptual boundaries: with his own hands he alters the purpose of household objects, elevating them to powerful, life-controlling machines.

Tim Hawkinson: The Mechanical/Scientific Approach to Hybrid Art
(Metapedia entry on Tim Hawkinson’s work)

(After the fold: another photo of the Coke-can-clock, a packaging-peanuts-bag-clock and an entirely different type of container…)

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February 15, 2010

Packaging Barcodes

From Yael & Reuben Miller’s new Vanity Barcodes™ site—we like these simple, haiku-like illustrations that allow a barcode to communicate on additional levels. (via: the dieline)

In a sense, all barcodes* are “packaging barcodes.” It would be tough to find a consumer package that did not have a UPC. The four examples above, however, are also “packaging barcodes” in the sense that each one illustrates the type of the package that it would likely appear on. (Which raises the specter of a Droste effect vanity barcode!)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

*Footnoted digression: “UPC” or “Barcode” ? I tend to call these UPCs, but I’m glad, in a way, that they went with “barcodes.” Why? Because with “UPC” (as with “IRA”) we tend to forget what it is that the initials stand for. As a result, people will say redundant stuff like ”UPC code” (Universal Price Code code)—or “IRA account” (Individual Retirement Account account). Not that Yael & Reuben would ever do that, but—you know—people who blog about it might.

January 10, 2010

Another type of kind of “can car”

A “car-in-a-can” that maybe should have been included in our first Cross-Category Packaging post (Part 1: Cans), but would have also made sense as a third type of “can car.” At any rate, here it is now as a feature story…

Miniature remote-control car, comes in a soda-can style package. (Via: Totally-Funky)

(Film, after the fold…)

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December 10, 2009

The Front Line

From Readers Digest (“in Cooperation with Super Market Institute”) this 1965 training film for grocery store “checkers” uses a cute war metaphor for the grocery business:

“Some people call this a war. War or not, one thing is for sure, a daily
battle is being waged in supermarkets all over this country, a battle
for the customer’s dollar.”

(Via the Internet Archive)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 13, 2009

Electroluminescent Packaging Patent

While having an impact on the packaging of pricier commodities (like liquor), electroluminescent film was originally envisioned of as a way of gaining attention for lower cost products. (like Cheetos snack foods)

From Anthony Robert Knoerzer & Garrett William Kohl’s 2003 patent for “Electroluminescent Flexible Film for Product Packaging”:

The present invention relates to electroluminescent flexible films incorporated into food or other product packaging…

… illuminated containers are more likely to grab the viewer’s attention than non-illuminated containers. Illuminating decorative designs helps emphasize illuminated parts, much like underlining helps emphasize marked text…

Because the film includes multiple light-transmitting layers that can be programmed to turned on and off in sequence, animated effects are possible. One startling application envisioned by the inventors: the possibility of creating a larger display spanning an array of packages.

(More illustrations and some display features of the patent claim, after the fold…)

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