packaging as content

December 29, 2010

Crush Proof Ad

Wrinkled magazine page with miraculously uncrushed cigarette box. This 2001 trompe l’oeil ad is by Hemisphere Leo Burnett, the advertising agency for Marlboro in the Philippines. (via: Coloribus)

(See aslo: Hinge-Lid, Hard-Pack, Flip-Top Box)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 27, 2010

Walkin’ Cigarette Pack

Looking at cigarette pack Christmas trees, I happened to see this 1960s Lark Walkin’ Cigarette Pack. (via: RubyLane.com)

I think there was also a Lucky Strike version of this wind up toy. The footprint motif on the carton is very reminiscent of the 1964 Hang Ten surfing brand logo…

Which led me in turn to this trademark page showing that in 1977 Philip Morris filed a trademark for “Hang Ten” cigarettes. (Which make me wonder: “Did they ever make any of those?”)

(More photos of the Walkin’ Cigarette Pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

December 24, 2010

Cigarette Packs as Christmas Tree Ornaments

While Raymond Lowey’s “Christmas Carton” turned the Lucky Strike logo into a sort of Christmas tree ornament—(see previous post)—the idea of using actual cigarette packs to decorate a Christmas tree was even more prevalent.

The three ads above all use this same concept: Lark Cigarettes in 1969 (via: AdsPast.com), L&M Cigarettes in 1956 (via: Stanford.edu) and Chesterfield Cigarettes in 1945 (via: Jon Williamson’s Flickr Photostream).

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

December 23, 2010

Raymond Loewy’s Lucky Strike “Christmas Carton”

Top photo via: TrinketsAndTrash.org; lower photo via: Worthpoint

From 1955: Mr. Raymond Loewy’s Lucky Strike “Christmas Carton”…

Rare that a television commercial ever notes the package designer, but Loewy was unusally high-profile:

He began designing packaging and logos in 1940 when George Washington Hill, then president of the American Tobacco Company, wagered him $50,000 that he could not improve the appearance of the already familiar green and red Lucky Strike cigarette package. Accepting the challenge, Loewy began by changing the package background from green to white, thereby reducing printing costs by eliminating the need for green dye. Next he placed the red Lucky Strike target on both sides of the package, increasing product visibility and ultimately product sales. A satisfied Hill paid off the bet, and for over 40 years the Lucky Strike pack has remained unchanged.

(via: RaymondLoewy.com)

(A Christmas carton magazine ad follows, after the fold…)

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December 22, 2010

Robert Motherwell & Gauloises Caporal

In the late 1960s Robert Motherwell, better known for his black & white, abstract-expressionist paintings, felt an attraction to Gauloises blue cigarette packaging:

I remember when in the last few years I made a series of aquatints with the Gauloises blue cigarette package—because I love that blue as part of the image—Helen Frankenthaler looking at me with stupefaction and saying, “I can’t imagine you being a Pop artist.” And certainly from the French point of view it must look like Pop Art. To me it looked as exotic as Tahiti must have looked to French travelers.

Robert Motherwell, 1971 (via: WarholStars.org)

(A couple of his cigarette pack aquatints, after the fold…)

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December 7, 2010

One Year (in the life of George Maciunas)

Top left photo from l_c_m_tt_’s Flickr Photostream

At MOMA until May 9, 2011: George Maciunas’s “One Year”

ONE YEAR (1973-1974) is a art installation by Lithuania-born American artist George Maciunas (1931-1978) consisting of the empty containers of various food and household products that he consumed over the course of one year. The work reflects the American consumer landscape of the early 1970s and the monotony of Maciunas’ daily regimen.

(via: NYC ♥ NYC)

(If you click on the top left photo and look closely, you will note that, in addition to food, Maciunas consumed a lot of asthma medications. This helps to explain what follows, after the fold….)

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November 30, 2010

Martha Stewart & Tareyton Cigarettes

Left: Tareyton Cigarette pack (logo design by Raphael Boguslav); right: still from 1960s Tareyton commercial

I’m terrible at identifying faces and I’m not saying for sure that this is Martha Stewart, but just hear me out…

Stewart began a modeling career. She was hired and appeared in several television commercials and magazines, including one of Tareyton’s famous “Smokers would rather fight than switch!” cigarette advertisements.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Martha Stewart

Okay, but was it a Tareyton TV commercial or a Tareyton print ad? (The quote above is ambiguous.)

Many actors who would later become well-known for other reasons appeared in the Tareyton ads. Examples include future entrepreneur Martha Stewart, who appeared in a print ad, and actor Lyle Waggoner, who was featured in a television commercial in 1966.

from Wikipedia’s entry on “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!”

If this Wikipedia entry is correct and there is a Tareyton print ad in existence in which Martha Stewart has a black eye, then I suggest it might be the one below, on the right:

The photo on the left is Martha Stewart in 1961; the ad on the right is from a 1965 magazine

Some sources, however, suggest that it was actually a television commercial that Stewart had appeared in. In discussing Tareyton ads in general, MsBlueSky emphatically states on her Flickr site:

FACT: A then 25 year old Martha Stewart appeared in one of Tareyton’s television commericals in 1966 with Lyle Waggoner, a 70s TV actor.

That commercial is below, although I am unconvinced that the actress appearing in it is Martha Stewart. (Also: Stewart’s modeling career was supposed to have been while she was a teenager, so the “25 year old” assertion seems wrong, as well.)

In an interview with Larry King, however, Stewart does say that she appeared in a Tareyton commercial:

STEWART: During high school, I became a photography model. I was at the Stuart Agency (ph) and also at the Ford Agency. So I did modeling.

KING: Were you a successful model?

STEWART: Yes, I was. I mean, I wasn’t what is considered successful now with million-dollar contracts, but I made $35 an hour to start. Then I went up to $50 an hour. That was a lot of money in those days.

KING: Were your family happy with this?

STEWART: Oh, they were very happy and allowed me to save my money for my education. So it was all saved. And I remember making some commercials. I did a Lifebuoy soap commercial.

KING: You did?

STEWART: Well, when I was like 15.

KING: Lifebuoy, Lifebuoy.

STEWART: I played a young married. Can you imagine? As I say, I was 15-years-old. And then I did a Tareyton “I’d rather fight than switch” commercial, you know? And then I practiced smoking…

KING: You did a cigarette commercial?

STEWART: I know. I tried to smoke for a week. And when I finally made the commercial, all I had to do was hold the cigarette like that. So…

KING: You didn’t blow it out in that phony fashion?

STEWART: No.

CNN transcript of “Interview with Martha Stewart, Martha Kostyra”
Larry King Live, December 22, 2003

That being the case, I think it’s more likely that the video below is the Martha Stewart Tareyton commercial in question.

But go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 29, 2010

Cigarette Pack Charms

Two Eppy miniature Tareyton cigarette packs via The Mule Wagon Antiques & Collectibles

Among the charms made to resemble tiny packages, cigarettes figure prominently. Some of these were kid’s vending machine charms, of the type we featured last Friday…

9 cigarette pack charms from Eureka Gumball Charm Nirvana

Not the sort of toys today’s parents would encourage their children to play with, but no surprise that toys like these would be around in the late 1950s and early 60s. (In those days, candy cigarette packs and the like were considered culturally acceptable products for children playing grown up.)

Other, earlier cigarette pack charms seem to have been intended for an older demographic…

Charm bracelet and charms via: WorthPoint.com

“American teenagers in the 1950s and early 1960s collected charms to record the events in their lives.”

Wikipedia entry on “Charm Bracelets”

If such charms were intended to commemorate significant teenage events, one has to wonder, “What milestones were being commemorated here?” Learning to smoke? Changing brands?

(More examples, after the fold…)

(more…)

November 5, 2010

Robert Loughlin’s Brutish Re-Branding

Some package-related artworks by Robert Loughlin. Prolific and single-minded, Loughlin has been painting “the brute” —(his signature squared-jawed smoking man)— on innumerable objects and surfaces since the early 1980s.¹ That some of these objects would be packages, only stands to reason. In tagging them with his own de facto logo, Loughlin² has, in effect re-branded them:

The vintage Mobil Oil can, the Brillo Box³, the perfume bottle picture—(I’m guessing that’s a magazine ad, rather than an actual bottle?)— Kodak Carousel Slide Tray boxes, a record label, a Sears Blanket insert card…

In recent years, Loughlin’s cartoonish, hyper-masculine, smoking “brute” has been featured in The New York Times, Apartment Therapy, Design Boom, etc. While most cite partner, Gary Carlson and his muse and inspiration for “the brute” motif, another important influence may be Leo Burnett’s “Marlboro Man” as the magazine clipping below (from Loughlin’s photo web site) seems to suggest.

Filters at the time were described by Leo Burnett as “sissy”. Real men didn’t smoke filter tipped cigarettes. … Marlboro sold masculinity in 1954 by being the first brand to use “real men” versus the prior models. And what men! They showed football players, cowboys, airplane pilots, and sailors. These were tough, real men… The ads were not just masculine, but were single-mindedly masculine They portrayed manly, rugged men doing manly, rugged jobs.

From Tobacco Documents Online: page 1 of “The Marlboro Success Story,”
a 1985 marketing report made available online as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement

(What is the deal with the guns and the Marlboro pack above? Are the guns little? Or is it an oversized cigarette pack? I don’t know.) The machine gun on the left, is a vintage Tru-matic brand toy machine gun, painted and signed by the artist.

There is also Luke Joerger's film Pickers and Grinners which documents Loughlin’s prowess as a preeminent NY antique picker…

(See a clip of this movie—that features celebrity gossip & packaging—after the fold…)

(more…)

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

October 4, 2010

Marlboro Beer

In the early 1970s, after buying Miller Brewing Company, Philip Morris experimented with extending its Marlboro Cigarettes brand to cover beer, as well…

Tobacco giant Philip Morris had just acquired full ownership of Miller Brewing during the previous year. The company had big plans for Miller, hoping to apply the same advertising strategies to the beer industry that it had used to propel Marlboro cigarettes to the top position within the tobacco industry. (The company even test-marketed “Marlboro Beer” but ultimately shelved it.)

BeerHistory.com

Ever since reading about that, I've been looking for photos of the test-marketed “Marlboro Beer” packaging and this weekend they turned up. The three bottle photos above are from a listing on Craig’s List: Marlboro Beer – $1000 (Lake of the Ozarks)

The 1970 trademark filing, I found on Trade.Mar.cz, proving (I think) that this is the real deal and not some Photoshop sleight of hand (like this or this).

This idea of Marlboro making a cross-branded beer goes to my earlier thread about products that combine or conflate smoking and drinking.

(The full trademark filing and how Marlboro might have cross marketed both products, after the fold…)

(more…)

August 19, 2010

Liquid Smoking — Liquid Smoke

Thinking about the apparently propensity (of certain inventors) for combining smoking and drinking, I wondered, “How far has this trend gone without my having even noticed?” (As it happens: things have gotten pretty far out…)

Unbeknownst to me—(a non-smoker and dilettante drinker)—it is now possible to reverse the usual way of doing things. Thanks to a number of recent technological breakthroughs, today’s modern consumer now drinks cigarettes and inhales alcoholic beverages.

The “Liquid Smoking” brand, above, is actually something of a misnomer. More like an energy drink with borrowed tobacco glamor, it originally came in a can designed to resemble a Marlboro cigarette pack, but contains no tobacco or nicotine. Recently the product appears to have undergone a brand makeover. (inset photo on right) Electronic cigarettes come closer to using a sort of liquid tobacco, but while futuristic and high-tech, they are still inhaled like old-fashioned cigarettes and do not constitute a breakthrough tobacco beverage.

The name “Liquid Smoking” derives from the barbeque favor additive known as “Liquid Smoke.” (Photo of hand holding Colgin Liquid Smoke, above: from Meghan Deutscher’s Flickr Photostream)

Photo, above, from: Andrew Filer’s Flickr Photostream

“Liquid smoke”—while having nothing to do with tobacco, really is a liquid made from smoke.

“Liquid smoke consists of smoke produced through the controlled burning of wood chips or sawdust, condensed and then passed through water, which captures and dissolves the smoke-flavored components in solution.”

Wikipedia entry on “Liquid Smoke”

“A Ham is a Queer Thing for a Druggist to Sell…

…It is, but Krausers’ Liquid Extract of Smoke to smoke it, is not.”

Originally developed as a meat preservative—and promoted as an easier alternative to using a “smoke house”—liquid smoke is another of those products that date back to the era of patent medicines.

Krauser’s “Liquid Extract of Smoke” was actually manufactured and sold by a pharmacy based in Milton, PA.

The advertisement on right was published in 1899, in the Meyer Brothers Druggist, Volume 20.

(More liquids & smoke, after the fold…)

(more…)

August 18, 2010

Ashtray Bottles

Jim Dingilian’s smoke-illustrated bottles from yesterday started us out on this week’s “smoking & drinking” thread. Ever notice how these two activities often seem go together? (See also: de Kooning’s smoking preferences and drinking preferences)

The drawing above from Catherine Miller’s 1955 patent application brings both vices together in one container. Ostensibly a “multi-purpose container“— although it really seems intended to serve just two primary purposes: smoking & drinking.

(Some other variations on the theme, after the fold…)

(more…)

August 6, 2010

de Kooning’s Cigarette Brand

And long as we’re cataloging the vices and brand choices of the late Willem de Kooning… The detail (above right) from Rudy Burkhardt’s 1950 photograph—“Willem de Kooning (with cigarettes)”—shows that the brand of cigarettes that de Kooning smoked was “Lucky Strike.”

Photographer Rudy Burkhardt, who Willem introduced to Elaine, later recalled that “Bill was incredibly in love with her, but she didn’t treat him very well at the beginning .. She would lean back on the couch and say, ‘Bill. Cigarette.’ And he would leap to get it.”

From Elaine de Kooning’s bio on The Art Story (by Justin Wolf)

“I cut out a lot of mouths. First of all I thought everything ought to have a mouth. Maybe it was like a pun. Maybe it’s sexual. But whatever it is, I used to cut out a lot of mouths and then I painted those figures and then I put the mouth more or less in the place where it was supposed to be. It always turned out to be very beautiful and it helped me immensely to have this real thing.”

–Willem de Kooning

A footnote from Marcia Brennan’s Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction:

“Richard Shiff points out Ihat Hess [Thomas B. Hess] erroneously identified the the T-zone ad as being for Lucky Strike, when in fact this imagery accompanied Camel cigarettes.”

Most likely this misidentification was because Hess knew that de Kooning smoked Luckies and somehow assumed that the artist’s choice of source material would coincide with his brand choice.

(One more de Kooning / cigarette-related artwork, after the fold…)

(more…)

July 13, 2010

Robert Brownjohn’s Bachelor Pack

Robert Brownjohn’s ill-fated “Bachelor” cigarette pack concept from 1961: a great example of how a package can illustrate its contents with literal isometric views on each side. (Similar to the Long Egg 10-pack carton)

Why so ill-fated? From her book on Brownjohn’s life and work, Emily King provides an explanation and an object lesson in client relations for graphic designers:

Seldom straying far from a smoker’s hand, a cigarette packet is a de facto personal accessory. As such, it must be stylish and, from the tobacco company’s point of view, it should advertise their product as explicitly as possible. Brownjohn’s design for Bachelor cigarettes achieved these two aims with perfect conceptual economy. In terms of stripped-down chic, the Bachelor packet is unbeatable. Moreover, there is no better way of identifying a product by its package than simply illustrating it on the surface of the box. Why this design never went further than maquette stage is something of a mystery. Player’s Cigarettes, the manufacturer of the Bachelor brand… remained a highly conservative concern. …it is easy to imagine Brownjohn’s lack of inhibition did not endear him to the traditionalists on the Player’s board.

According to Alan Fletcher, Player’s Cigarettes reneged on the design because Brownjohn bragged about his idea around town, effectively pre-empting the product launch.

Willie Landels remembers Brownjohn filling his maquette with tampons and handing it around to the clients. This gesture is unlikely to have gone over well. In addition to straightforward provocation, it was a brilliant subversion of the box’s pretence of transparency. Brownjohn was exposing his own collusion with the social norms that govern which items are fit for public display and which must remain hidden.

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

(Another version of Brownjohn’s Bachelor pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

June 30, 2010

Bridget Riley’s Rolling Papers

Top left: a detail of photo by Arnold Newman of Bridget Riley smoking in her London studio in 1966; on right: a portion of a 1964 photo by David Newell Smith of Riley posing with a cigarette in front of one of her paintings in 1964; lower photo: a handmade rolling papers pack from OddSock’s Flickr Photostream—(the pattern is a reproduction of Riley’s, “Cataract”)

One of the packages we featured on Monday in “The Bridget Riley Look” was a pack of cigarettes, but it was in David Newell Smith’s photo of Bridget Riley (above right) that I first noticed that she, herself, was a smoker.

We’ve looked at photos of smoking celebrities before—(see: Arents Tobacco Collection)—but it’s funny how the cigarette in this photo nearly disappears into the lines of the painting behind her. With all the other associations one can draw from those wavy lines, here’s one more: smoking. Maybe she’s quit smoking since then. I don’t know.

“I once had dinner with Bridget Riley. I can't remember much about the occasion—it was at the house of a prominent broadcaster, one firmly rooted in the arts establishment— except that Riley herself was like-ably dynamic and feisty, keen on hand-rolled cigarettes, and professed herself—as she often has in print—to be an anarchist.”

“Read between the lines:
Are Bridget Riley’s paintings really fine art?”
Will Self, The Independent, November 29, 2008

Of course, “rolling papers,” ostensibly sold for tobacco cigarettes, have a well-known “off-label” use. Similarly, psychedelic sixties culture found a use for Riley’s patterned paintings that she had not intended:

… their dizzying effect and their evocation of movement, coupled with their ultra-modern monochromatic coolness, her black and white paintings somehow articulated a kind of Space-Age psychedelia—concerns that could not, then or now, have been further from Bridget Riley’s thinking, character or approach to art-making. Twenty-five years later… she said to me that, as regards the attempts to relate her art to the psychedelic experience: “I was surprised to be seen as a sort of representative of an aspect of the psychedelic culture. It was a collision between my intentions as an artist and the cultural context in which I found myself. I remember being told as though it was some sort of compliment that it was the greatest kick to go down and smoke in front of my painting…”

“Seeing is Believing” by Michael Bracewell
Frieze, September 23, 2008

(More about Bridget Riley and smoking, after the fold…)

(more…)

June 28, 2010

The Bridget Riley Look

Upper left: painter, Bridget Riley (mid-sixties photo by John Goldblatt); on right “Paper Caper” brand “Op Art” paper dress and packaging; lower left: detail of 1966 photo by F.C. Gundlach of Brigitte Bauer, wearing an “Op Art” swimsuit by Sinz Vouliagmeni (via Art Blart); on right: “Antivert” Vertigo drug packaging (via: DJ Misc)

"Manufacturers of all kinds have been trying to give their packaging the Bridget Riley Look, and have harassed the gallery with unwelcome offers. The most ironic proposition to date has come from the manufacturer of a headache remedy.”

John Canaday, “That’s Right It’s Wrong”
The New York Times, Mar. 14, 1965

Some more recent examples of Bridget Riley’s continuing influence, below:

Upper left: Siggi Eggertsson’s Coke poster for Armchair Media; on right and below: Dhanyhaploy Nutkasem’s “Optical Illusion Packaging” conflates optical illusions with seasickness and “dizzy headaches”; 2nd and 3rd row left: Meeta Panesar’s “Op Art” wine packaging—note “Op Art” typography—(via: PopSop); lower right: Akroe’s Vogue Cigarette packs (via: PopSop)

(Tomorrow: the product category that has most enthusiastically embraced “the Bridget Riley look”.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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