packaging as content

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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

October 30, 2009

Budweiser Phones

Researching prior art for the earlier post on Bud Light’s audio speaker box, I found there were quite a few Budweiser telephones available for sale on eBay. (Mostly beer can-shaped phones, but a few shaped like bottles, as well.) A similar advertising promotion to package-shaped transistor radios, I suspect that these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 24, 2009

S.O.S at the 1959 Kitchen Debate

In the OP-Ed section today’s NY Times, William Safire has a fascinating account of how he came to take the iconic photo of Nixon & Khrushchev discussing the kitchen of the “typical American home” in the 1959 exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Awesome product placement for S.O.S (and for future Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev, as well). Some excerpts:

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans…

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California. See that built-in washing machine?”

Khrushchev: “We have such things.”

Nixon: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.”

Khrushchev: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”

… Because the Russian press had derided the American claim that the house was affordable to workers — calling it “a Taj Mahal” — Nixon noted that this house cost $14,000, and a government-guaranteed veterans mortgage made it possible for a steelworker earning $3 an hour to buy it for $100 a month. Khrushchev was sarcastic: “We have peasants who also can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.”

… originally slugged “the Sokolniki summit” but Harrison was willing to change that slug-line to the equally alliterative “kitchen conference” at my plea (my client was the house builder, not Nixon and certainly not the Russian park).

… A few hours after the kitchen conference, at our ambassador’s residence, I was introduced to Nixon, who showed his grasp of capitalism’s priorities by commenting, “We really put your kitchen on the map, didn’t we?”

William Safire NY Times
The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen
NY Times, July 23, 2009

Funny how “modern conveniences” and consumer packaged goods figured into the idealogical debates of that period…

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

July 18, 2009

The Göbellamp Bottle

If you read Thursday’s light bulb bottles post all the way to the “footnoted digression” at the end, then you know what this is. I found an actual photo of the “Göbellamp” light-bulb / eau-de-cologne bottle. (I’m guessing it’s a recreation of the 1854 prototype.) More photos of Heinrich Göbel’s arcane apparatus can be seen: here.

And as long as I’m tying up loose ends in connection with light bulbs and packaging… Here’s a link to Smithsonian.org where you’ll find instructions for using a jar to make your own incandescent bulb.

Also: instructions (here) for making these “Weeble” salt and pepper shakers from light bulbs (below).

(Here on box vox, we are all about the light bulbs, the salt & pepper and the weebles.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 22, 2009

Radioactive Packaging

From the Standard Chemical Company Photo Album (ca. 1915-1920)—no caption but I’m guessing that what we’re looking at are lead-lined tubes for containing a “radioactive source,” an elegant leather snap case and a wrapped shipping parcel (with twine & sealing wax for security). 

After Marie Curie’s discoveries in the late 1800’s and well into the early 1900’s—before the dangers of radiation were well understood—radium, radon, uranium (and radiation in general) were considered modern and high-tech. Plenty of products that were not even radioactive capitalized on the glamor of radioactivity by incorporated “radium” and “uranium” etc. into their brand names. (Radium Brand Butter, Radium Brand Cigars, Radium Cigarettes, Radium Condoms, Radium Beer, X-Ray Soap, Uranium Ice Cream, and more recently: Radioactive Energy Drink.) 

But radioactivity was also touted as a a miracle cure and innumerable products were manufactured with radioactive ingredients and long patent-medicine-style lists of claimed health benefits.

From The Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection—top left: radium water (jar itself is not measurably radioactive, some sort of emanation device (e.g., a radioactive disk) would have been kept inside); to the right: Hungarian Radiumvizes Bread (radium water … was used in the production of the bread … As such, the bread would have contained slightly elevated levels of radium, but nothing that could be considered dangerous); below: “Radioaktive“ Toothpaste from WWII Germany. According to the tube, “Its radioactive radiation increases the defenses of teeth and gums”; second row: two radioactive mens health products—left: Vita-Radium Suppositories (“These suppositories were guaranteed to contain real radium—and probably did”); right: The Radiendocrinator (Product directions: Male—Place Radiendocrinator in the pocket of this adaptor… Wear adaptor like any  “athletic strap”… This puts the instrument under the scrotum as it should be. wear at night. Radiate as directed.); third row left: Arium Radium Tablets (For rheumatism. neuritis, neuralgia, gout, etc. Directions: “Take two tablets with glass of water before or after each meal. To derive the most beneficial effects, ARIUM should be taken regularly as directed.”); on right: radium bromide bottles (“These homeopathic triturations containing radium bromide powder were distributed from a pharmacy in Pennsylvania in the 1960s”); bottom left: Radithor “Eben Byers was the  founder of the A.M. Byers Company, one of the world's largest steel companies…  At the recommendation of his doctor, he began drinking Radithor… he averaged three bottles a day for two years.  Byers stopped consuming Radithor in 1930 when his teeth started falling out and holes appeared in his skull. Perhaps more than anything else, his death in 1932 alerted the public, and much of the medical profession, of the harmful effects of "mild" radium therapy.” (1932 WSJ headline: The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off); on right: a Wards Radium Ore Heating Pad.

Like Eben Beyers, mentioned in the caption above, Marie Curie, herself, was an unwitting victim of radiation exposure.

By the 1950s & 1960s, while the public stilled viewed radiation as something modern and futuristic, this view was now tinged with the threat of atomic war and nuclear fallout. Retail kits for detecting radiation ran the gamut from uranium prospecting, to bomb-shelter fallout-detection to educational science kits. The idea of radioactivity as a panacea and cure-all had largely fallen out of favor—(although the radium bromide above is from the 1960s!)

(Photos of radiation testing kits, after the fold…)

(more…)

June 14, 2009

The Flat-Bottomed Paper Bag

Following the thread of the previous two posts—(about early shopkeeper “packets” and a new bring-your-own-container shop)—leads inexorably to the subject of bags. 

Thomas Hine on the invention of the paper bag:

… Historically, paper bags preceded the popularization of the package. In fact, the paper bag, into which the grocer would scoop small quantities of sugar, rice, or other commodities from a big barrel, was what packages had an often difficult time displacing. Still, the introduction of paper bags represented an extremely important transitional step, because they were found to increase sales wherever they were used. It was no longer necessary to bring canisters to the grocery store to be refilled with staple commodities. Paper bags ensured that shoppers could carry home whatever they had bought. By reducing such barriers to purchasing, they acted, in effect, as a lubricant to allow the retailing machine to hum along at a continuous, predictable pace.

(An anthropomorphic flat-bottomed paper bag, after the fold…)

(more…)

June 6, 2009

Zero-Gravity Coke Packaging

No, nothing to do with Coke Zero. This post is actually a follow-up to the Canada Dry space-branding of Astronaut Water.

Coca-Cola is another of those companies that has sought borrowed interest and outer-space glamour from the space program:

In 1985, astronauts tested the “Coca-Cola Space Can” [on left) aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. The experiment was not really a success, due to the lack of refrigeration and the zero gravity conditions, but on the lighter side of space, floating “soda balls” did provide a source of entertainment for the astronauts.

from Coca-Cola-Art.com

Coca-Cola, however, did not confine their testing to NASA. Exemplifying the new sort of partisan/non-partisan posture that transnational companies can now assume, Coke also sought help from Russian cosmonauts. In 1991 aboard the Soviet space station Mir, a new & improved version of their “Space Can” was put through its paces.

(More weightless Coca-Cola packaging, after the jump…)

(more…)

June 4, 2009

Astronaut Water Bottles

This photo (on left) of Gemini “9” Astronaut Water, from The Imaginary World site, took me by surprise because I had been thinking that non-fizzy, packaged water as a mass-market consumer product did not occur until the 1980s. (See: Bottlemania) 

This 1960s space-capsule-shaped bottle from Canada Dry would appear to be an anomalous tie-in product designed to capitalize on popular interest in space travel at the time. I could see how the bottle would appeal to kids, but water? In the mid-1960s with no sugar?

According to the copy at the bottom of the bottle Canada Dry seems to had an arrangement with Nasa to supply drinking water: “for astronauts and space systems in flight.”

The matching item on the right is a space-capsule-shaped-bottle—shaped bank.

(More astronaut bottles, after the fold…)

(more…)

June 2, 2009

Jason Huff’s Ceramic Spray-Paint Cans

While researching the genealogy of aerosol paint cans for the previous post, I happened upon Jason Huff’s 2003 “Spray-Paint Cans” project. Handmade ceramic versions of aerosol cans. (The nozzle stems are made of cathode wire.) Not an up-cycled modern can, but a cargo-cult like re-creation. Aerosol-can replicas made using the ancient packaging method of antiquity. (i.e. clay)  Not functional vessels, except perhaps as reliquary containers. But what miraculous contents might such containers contain? (The Faith of Graffiti)?

(Two more of Huff’s ceramic spray-paint cans, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 31, 2009

4 Aerosol Paint Can Spin-Offs

I’ve got 4 spray-paint-can related items that I had been planning to ration out one at a time, but since they all seem to have evolved from the same set of cultural chromosomes, I’m now thinking that it would make more sense to look at them all in one fell swoop.

Just to remind ourselves that aerosol paint cans did not always signify renegade street art & graffiti, I give you a historical note about the father of the spray paint can, Edward Seymour. (pictured, above left)

In 1949, Edward Seymour added paint to existing aerosol can technology at his wife Bonnie’s suggestion. Initially designed to demonstrate his aluminum paint, the delivery system itself was instantly popular. Seymour of Sycamore, Inc. still produces aerosol spray paints to this day.

Wikipedia entry on aerosol paint cans

The thing about a spray paint container is that it’s not just a container. It’s also the tool used to apply the paint. And because of that, spray paint cans are natural candidates for being turned into fetish objects signifying graffiti. Like artists’ paint brushes—(see: Jasper Johns)—spray paint cans have taken on the cachet of an entire creative pursuit. Although with spray paint cans there is also a kind of cultural vandalism being embraced. Spray paint is, after all, a packaged product that must now be purchased from a special locked cabinet because its renegade customers may transgress the rules of private & public property.

1. Jake Rankin’s Spray Paint Lamps

Jake Rankin turns used spray paint cans into desk lamps, with the spray nozzle as a switch. Obviously appealing for fans of graffiti and/or fans of upcycling. (Not really sure how often those two demographic groups might overlap.)

I think these lamps have an interesting counterintuitive aspect. Both light and spray paint are thought of and depicted in similar ways—as a sort of expanding, but dissipating ray. Yet the lamp’s light does not emerge from the same place that the spray paint does. The light comes from a bulb in the base of the can rather than the nozzle. I know there are practical reasons for this, but formally and conceptually… I’m just saying.

(via the unconsumption blog)

(3 more aerosol paint can spin-offs, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 28, 2009

Coca-Cola Icepick Premium

A complimentary Coca-Cola icepick.

What now looks like a lethal weapon with advertising was once a necessary tool—in the days before ice cubes were dispensed from the door of your fridge. 

I think these photos came from findgreatstuff.com but since I can’t find it there now, I’m guessing maybe someone’s already grabbed this.

Randy Ludacer
Beack Packaging Design

May 17, 2009

Soda Blasting

Similar to sand blasting, but with baking soda. (Remember “plinking” and “plasma pinch”?)

This soda blasted pop can is still full of soda!

Blasted at 50 PSI with sodium bicarbonate, the surface has been restored to it’s original pre-painted condition. There is no pitting, etching, warpage or heat distortions.

Soda blasting is a process in which an environmentally safe product of sodium bicarbonate… is used as a specially formulated blast media to clean and strip most surfaces using a high volume but low pressure blasting machine. The soda serves as a mild abrasive that will remove or etch paint.

from CobBlaster.com

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

May 8, 2009

Bottle-Shaped Bottle-Openers

Conceptually similar to the can-shaped can-opener: life-sized faux bottle that is actually a bottle-opener. (See: “Be Open” bottle openers)

Other bottle-shaped openers (usually with miniaturized bottles) are fairly prevalent on eBay, especially branded, bottle-shaped swag—some going back to the 1800s. Below, a bottle-shaped corkscrew from Anheuser-Busch.

Below: a vintage Pepsi-Cola opener (looking a bit like a Catsup bottle here…)

And below: a Seagrams crown-cap bottle-opener. (The opener ejects from the bottom when the cap/button is pressed.)

(More bottle-shaped bottle-opener swag—some of it packaged—after the fold…)

(more…)

May 4, 2009

Bottle Amps

From Japanese electronics site, Kyohritsu: a DIY version of Fender’s “can amp” concept. Only here the idea is to upcycle actual beverage bottles. Or are they cans? (See: “canbiguity”)

No speakers, but they appear to be tube amps—which is cool. (love the heat sink!)

(More photos, after the fold…)

(more…)