box vox

u-bet: je ne se qua

Cruel father that I am, a couple of months ago I acquired two foods that are quite popular around here, but instead of putting them into general circulation in the family cupboard, I kept them on my desk. After an interminable 2-month consumption-embargo, I finally got around to photographing them this weekend.

One of these foods was Fox’s U-bet Original Chocolate Flavor Syrup. Popular, because you can use it to make chocolate egg creams, but what is there to say about its package? There were other chocolate (flavored) syrups on the shelf, that doubtless would make fine egg creams. Why was this the brand I purchased? Clunky and typographically awkward. Some unidentified Shirley Temple-ish child featured in the logo—(the Wendy of her day?)

There would seem to be little here for a contemporary package designer to love. Why would I—why would any consumer buy a package like that?

In groping towards a working theory to explain its apparent sales success, I asked myself, “if a product has packaging that looks like it hasn’t been changed in 50 years and is still being produced and sold, what does that say about the product?”

Maybe it says: this product is very good and—despite the packaging—there are a great many loyal customers who know it.

I think that may come close to it. A graphically unsophisticated package will sometimes be given not just the benefit of the doubt, but an assumption of quality and ‘authenticity’, not generally afforded to the slicker, more mainstream corporate packaging efforts. Am I over-thinking it?

There’s a Flickr group devoted to hand painted “folk typography.” Is the u-bet bottle folk packaging? The DIY ethos of an earlier era—Mom & Pop cottage industry packaging? Or Is it merely kitsch packaging?

In a post on BoingBoing—(See: Hyperbolic Bronnerianism in Graphic Design)—Xeni Jardin focused on the typographic overkill of certain packages: “... crazy mushed up text with LOTS OF ALL CAPS! BOLD! I-T-A-L-I-C !  Nnnnnooooo negative space! on product labels.”

“Hyperbolic Bronnerianism” might be a subset of the category I’m attempting to describe, but not all of my examples would be so overblown. U-bet may be typographically unsophisticated, but it’s certainly not the cacophony of styles that Jardin is talking about.

Perhaps it’s naïve packaging? There’s a book out called Naive: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design. The examples contained are charming and vintage, but, to my eye, not unsophisticated.

Regarding vintage graphic design and “naïveté” Michael Bierut writes,

It is tempting to call designs of this era naïve. But I don’t think so. Not these designs. It would be, I think, incorrect to call Paul Rand’s Bab-o cleanser container naïve. It had a kind of knowing beatnik look... The main differences between those old packages and the one we have today is style...  Technology is style.

via: The Package Unseen

Sometimes, it’s the small regional products that have this “u-bet” characteristic. I know it may sound culturally arrogant, perhaps imperialistic, but, here in the U.S.A., if I stroll with my cart down the “international aisle” of my super market, I can usually find quite few packages with that u-bet je ne se qua.

Says Durban-based photographer/graphic designer, Garth Walker (about the orange bag of Nyala Super Maize Meal, on right):

This remains the best example of South African packaging that I’ve yet seen and it should be enshrined in bronze above every designer’s Mac. It falls into that “lost” category of local graphic design in which, like so many local brands we love and adore, the designer is unknown. Probably a “lowly designer” (in the days of Magic Markers and Letraset) working in the studio of one of our über packaging or printing companies. “Creative” was probably not mentioned in the brief nor in the presentation to client. However, it’s truly local, relevant, striking, unique and long-lived—a lesson to all of us trying to be “local is lekker” and build a brand through packaging. Oh, and I do have it on permanent display in our studio.

via: Design Indaba

At first, I was thinking of u-bet’s bottle as a sort of “outsider” packaging. Like outsider art: the work of some untrained packaging genius who follows none of the established design principles, but somehow gets it right, anyway. Perhaps done many years ago by the company’s founder (or an unschooled relative) and then left unchanged. Benign neglect packaging?

The thing is, while I don’t really know how long the U-bet Chocolate Syrup label has looked like this, I do know that it didn’t come in this type of bottle when it first came out in 1942.

(See the earlier U-bet bottle, after the fold...)

Printed = Bad. Embossed = Good.

Probably not a bona fide trend, but the idea of using embossed branding as a more “eco-friendly” alternative to printing with inks, is an idea that has lately been gaining some traction.

While it’s doubtful the the FDA would ever really accept embossed warnings or nutritional info as sufficiently legible for consumer packaging, the low-key branding of these monochromatic concept packages for Coke, holds a certain appeal for those who favor a quieter, more subtle type of branding.

On the left, above, is “Touch” from Swig Studio—a proposed embossed carton. On the right is “Colorless” by Harc Lee of Ryan Harc—a proposed colorless, embossed aluminum can, which they say...

... can help to reduce air and water pollution occurred in its coloring process. It also reduces energy and effort to separate toxic color paint from aluminum in recycling process. Huge amount of energy and paint required to manufacture colored cans will be saved.

Instead of toxic paint, manufacturers process aluminum with a pressing machine that indicates brand identity on surface.

from Ryan Harc’s Behance site

UK-based Mind Design makes a similar claim about their molded pulp box for Lacoste:

“The most eco-friendly way to package a shirt was not to print on the packaging at all but use embossing instead.”

Sometimes form trumps color. Texture can seem more authentic than faux 3D graphics with highlights and drop shadows. Like packaging that might have been created on the gray planet of Ixchel (from Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 young adult sci-fi novel, A Wrinkle in Time) these colorless packs carry certain virtuous connotations, quite apart from their specific ecological claims.

Just as in L’Engle’s book where the blind inhabitants of Ixchel serve food that looks “gray and dull but tastes wonderfully delicious,” we make a surprising assumption this type of packaging: that good things come in plain, colorless packages.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Oatmeal Box Radios

Photo from The Rocketeer’s Flickr Photostream 

Quaker Oats came out with their cylindrical box in 1915, coincidentally coinciding with the popularity of home-brewed crystal radio sets.

Young boys were at the forefront of the broadcasting movement and were frequently credited with introducing the technology into their households. Given the scarcity and expense of factory-ready receivers, the boys’ primitive crystal sets, often made by wrapping wire around an empty Quaker Oats can, were no longer seen as trivial toys. At the opening of the First National Radio Conference in 1922, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover directly acknowledged the “genius of the American boy,” and observed that many of them possessed the requisite knowledge to create a radio station.

Noah Arceneaux
Paul Reveres of Early Radio:
The Boy Scouts and the Origins of Broadcasting

---

“Sales of Quaker Oats went zooming, not because the populace had suddenly gone ape over hot cereal, but because the cylindrical box made a perfect base for coil winding.”

San Diego’s Hysterical History
By Howard W. Howard, Herbert Lockwood

(More pictures of Quaker “oat box” radios, after the fold...)

Jac Leirner's Lung

Upper left & lower left photos: from Dutchnatasja’s Flickr Photostream; photo on right: from My Standard Break From Life’s Flickr Photostream

Maybe this should be my last post about Marlboro cigarette packaging. It started out innocently enough with the “flip top box” research, but I as I keep finding more and more Marlboro-related topics, it’s starting to feel a bit too much like chain smoking. Someone might mistake boxvox for some kind Marlboro brand “fan” site—the smoker’s equivalent of, say, the “Method Lust” blog. And It’s not like I’m a smoker. I can quit any time.

Which brings us to Brazilian sculptor, Jac Leirner. Like John Norwood—(who we covered: here)—the raw materials for her artwork above (entitled “Lung”) were accumulated via the artist’s own cigarette habit.

Lung (1987) was made at the time she gave up smoking. 1200 Marlboro packets (three year’s smoking) were dismembered into their constituent parts: each part, massed together, became a distinct sculptural entity and metaphor for the Lung. Together these made up the ensemble of the exhibition. One was made of the cellophane strips that you pull off first. another with the foil inner-wrappings. another with the price tags. and so on. Only the cigarettes were not there: they’d ‘gone up in smoke’.

Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists
By Guy Brett

(A photo of this sculpture from a distance, after the fold...)

Mustard Jar Fight Scene

The famous mustard-jar-fight-scene from “This Boy’s Life” features Robert DeNiro as the scary, abusive “Dwight,” using a not-quite-empty-enough mustard jar to punish young Leonardo DiCaprio (as “Toby”) for having wasted the remaining contents. (Sorry about the bad aspect ratio of the video—not my doing...)

Shows how a humble mustard jar can become a fiendish weapon—(see: Package as Weapon—which, come to think of it, also features poor Leonardo DiCaprio as a victim.) This harrowing scene also raises a practical question about packaging: how much of a package’s contents can we reasonably expect to actually use? And how much is inaccessible and will therefore be wasted?

Kai-yu Lei’s “dual-open bottle” (above) that I just noticed on PopSop, attempts to address this issue. As does Sherwood Forlee’s reversible peanut butter jar that we wrote about last year. Checking Forlee’s website again, I see he’s made some actual prototypes since then. (below)

 

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Hinge-Lid, Hard-Pack, Flip-Top Box

Now following up the Marlboro thread... (begun here and here)...

I happened to learn that it wasn’t Frank Gianninoto who designed the “flip-top box” as Thomas Hine (and others) seem to infer:

“Perhaps the most radical part of Gianninoto’s design was the new physical form it gave the package... a cardboard box with a top that flipped open.”

Marlboro Country Was One No Man’s Land
By Thomas Hine, April 16, 1995, NY Times

But, judging from other descriptions of the Marlboro pack design process, Gianninoto was responsible for the graphic design of the package—not the structural design.

...At David Lyon's suggestion, the company hired a new package designer, Frank Gianninoto, to respond to the Philip Morris call for “a bold, masculine-type package.” Production chief Clark Ames had recently returned from Germany with a flip-top box, hoping that it might serve as a prototype for the new Marlboro package. Initially the design team opposed the hard box, seeing it as a throwback to the 1850s, but the ultimately adopted it, eventually making rugged durability part of the brand's masculine image.

Producing fashion: commerce, culture, and consumers
By Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Delving a little deeper, what I seemed to learn was that it was Desmond W. Molins of The Molins Machine Company who had designed the structure:

The 1950s saw the introduction of the hinge-lid pack, which was originally invented and patented by Walter’s son, Desmond Molins, in 1937. The hinge-lid pack was a major step forward from the previous soft packs, which allowed cigarettes to be damaged, and was used by Philip Morris in 1954 to relaunch the Marlboro brand: it was instantly successful and Marlboro sales increased 50 fold.

From the Molin PLC website

(Looking in the online patent databases, I could not find the Desmond W. Molins 1937 hinge-lid pack patent. The patent drawings shown here are from subsequent patents, improving on the “prior art.”)

As a packaging machine company, Molins naturally offered a machine capable of making these new “hinge lid packs”—namely the “hinge lid packer” or “HLP.”

Archival photos from the Molins Tobacco Machinery site

Yet another version of the story of how Philip Morris came to adopt the Molins hinge-lid pack seems to focus on the hinge-lid packer machinery:

Desmond Molins well remembers the disappointment when the first hinge lid packer, which produced a two-row pack, was not well received. This type of packer only became popular after the chance sighting of a sample three row pack by a visiting Philip Morris representative who immediately recognised its potential.

World Tobacco
September, 1985

(Another patent drawing and a related video, after the fold...)

Significant Jar of Marbles

I’ve briefly touched on the “Significant Objects” project (here) in my post about Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes book: Taking Things Seriously, 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance.

A joint project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, “Significant Objects” is a sort of spin off from that book. Previously insignificant objects are given new meaning and increased monetary value, by virtue of having been written about in a story. The objects are then put up for sale on eBay. I bid on a cursed bottle, but (luckily for me) I lost.

Since then, I’ve been monitoring closely for significant packaging-related swag, but I haven’t really coveted any of the objects quite as much. Until now with this jar of marbles.

The weird thing is—as unappealing as some of this stuff is at first glance—these stories do a great job at transforming your initial repulsion into a desire to purchase. I was not instantly drawn to this reused Beechnut Baby Food jar and I don’t collect marbles, but after reading Ben Ehrenreich’s disturbing story about how this particular batch of marbles came to be contained in this jar, it has, for me, become a very desirable item.

I pull a marble from your skull each time we kiss. “Give it back,” you say, each time.

“Darling,” I say. “Baby,” I say. “No.”

I put the marble in my pocket. Later, I will hide it with the others. But not now, because now you’re watching. Now you’re getting mad. I knew you would, and now you’re doing it. You cross your arms. Your features droop. Not just your lips but your eyelids and ears and the cleft ball of your chin. All of it droops. I laugh at you. “Come here, Droopy,” I say, and I try to kiss you, but you pull away.

–Excerpt from Jar of Marbles by Ben Ehrenreich

Unfortunately with the bidding already up to $28.05 and with three more days to go before the auction ends, I don’t think I can compete for ownership of these marbles. Not when I’m paying out of a joint bank account. Even if I were willing to spend $50, $100, maybe even more on this super-significant jar of marbles—how on earth would I explain it to my significant other?

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Damian Ortega & Mexican Coke

Damian Ortega, “120 Days” (2002)

In 2002 Damián Ortega collaborated with Italian glassblowers to make alterations to 120 Coca Cola Bottles. Entitled “120 Days”—in reference both to the de Sade novel “The 120 Days of Sodom” and to the film Salò—this artwork follows the logic of the package-as-body metaphor to it logical (sadistic) conclusion.

“The idea of the Coke, the disorder produces fun but also some strange feeling, like something is wrong. ‘This Coca-Cola is so weird. Something’s wrong with them.’ It’s like the birds in the Hitchcock film, no? It’s like, hmm. Who are we? What are we doing? What are we thinking? What is our own relationship with the objects within society or the context.”

From Greg Cook’s Interview with  Damian Ortega
The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

“Molecula de Glucosa Expandidais” (an installation composed of bottle-caps strung on steel, loosely based on the glucose molecule)

In “Molecula de Glucosa Expandidais” Ortega used bottle caps to make a giant hanging glucose molecule. (Coincidentally alluding to that secret ingredient that has recently set Mexican Coke apart in the minds of some consumers—namely: sugar.)

“Molécula de glucose expandida is a work that deals with the consumption of sugar in Mexico as a collective and cultural phenomenon. It is exhibited as a molecule formed by particles that are soda bottlecaps collected from stores and restaurants in Mexico City. I enlarged the molecule to a huge size. It is a rhizome hanging from the ceiling, growing and expanding in the space like an alien. This work can be grasped from the inside or from the outside. It is a chemical structure, but also a social one: micro and macro.”

–Damián Ortega from Champ de Vision, Damián Ortega Part 2
by Anna Hiddleston and Sinziana Ravini

(A couple more photos, after the fold...)

Douglas Coupland's Plastic Bottle Sculptures

Upper left photo: by Martin Tessler for The New York Times; upper right: photo of the 2001 “Spike” installation at Totem Gallery; lower photos: mug shot photos of “Bottle No. 5 Downey”

I saw this article in the NY Times last week about writer/artist, Douglas Coupland’s home renovation project. The photo above (with the over-sized (unlabeled) Downy Fabric Softener bottle at the base of the stairs) caught my eye. I figured: if Coupland made this one package-related sculpture, then he must have made others...

I found them in the 2001 “Spike” installation at Totem Gallery.

The inspiration for ... the sculptures was a family crisis, Mr. Coupland said. His niece, Sarah, was born in Vancouver two years ago without a left hand, at a time when statistics there marked an upward turn—a spike—in birth defects...

The sculptures include huge plastic bottles, recognizable even without labels—Tide, Downy, Alberto VO5. Mr. Coupland had a vision one night in a Vancouver Wal-Mart, he said. He was struck with the beauty of detergent bottles and bought dozens.

“'Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it,” he added. The meaning was revealed when a friend pointed out that the bottles were all shaped to attract the hand—and that they contained chemicals that might cause birth defects.

from A night out with: Douglas Coupland; Escape From Gen X
By Phil Patton, NY Times, September 9, 2001

It turns out that Coupland has done plenty of other package-related artworks. Too many examples to show them all here...

(But I’ll show 4 more, after the fold...)

Clicker Cans

Photos of 1980s Coke and Dr Pepper “Clicker Cans” from USA Soda.com

I must have missed these in the early 80s when they came out. Interesting to note it now, in light of all the recent resealable-can ideas that have garnered attention. (See: Burn Energy Drink and Monster Energy Drink or this Pop Top Ad concept, or this Snap Cap attachment for cans)

The fact that these were put on the market in the 80s, but did not (apparently) catch on, maybe says something about the relative importance of this feature. From T. A. Turner’s book, Canmaking for Can Fillers:

Reclosable (and resealable) ends

A number of reclosable ends have been proposed of varying complexity and made entirely from metal or from a combination of metal and plastic. However, it must be stressed that the successful development of a reclosable end will depend as much on market needs as on technical excellence:

• Does the market actually need a reclosable or a resealable end?
• Do the fillers of beverage cans want either a reclosable or a resealable end; if they do, are they prepared to pay a premium for it, because it will certainly be more expensive?
• Are there special needs?

Under the heading ‘special needs’ would be included cans for outdoor activities (such as picnics and barbecues) where, for example, preventing insects (eg wasps) entering partially consumed drinks is claimed to be an issue... If the need is real, can the additional cost of such devices be justified when a simple plastic overcap, purchased for the occasion, may suffice? It is also true that a slightly larger tab, without the finger hole (which is now no longer functional), rotated through 180 would also keep out all but the smallest ‘intruders’.

Reclosable or partially reclosable features suggested have included screw-on closures (such as crowns), modified tabs, wasp-proof screens and sophisticated plastic button devices such as Continental Can’s clicker cap (see Figure 6.21). A number of novel developments to produce bottle-shaped containers in metal, with long necks of greatly reduced diameter, have appeared during recent years. In addition, a cone-topped beer can (the original beer-can format in the period 1940-50) has been relaunched, on a limited scale, in South Africa. These containers are easier to drink from and also provide the opportunity for alternative closures. The downside is that filling speeds are likely to be slower and that transportation (of empty containers) and presentation in the marketplace may have to be different.

T. A. Turner
Canmaking for Can Fillers

It could also be that the reason the 1980s clicker cans did not “catch on” may be that they look too much like one of these.

(A couple more photos after the fold...)

Package as meaningful object

I recently purchased and read this book by Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes: Taking Things Seriously, 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance.

The concept as presented in Joshua Glenn’s introduction:

“Step into the living room, study, office, studio, or den of just about any engaged, imaginative, passionate individual and you’ll gravitate toward an item that, although it might not appear particularly valuable, is reverently displayed as if it were a precious and irreplaceable artifact. Inquire about the object’s provenance and you’ll be treated to a lively anecdote about how it came into your host’s possession. Keep digging, and you might crack the code of what the thing means.”

A very nice object in it’s own right, this book, designed by Carol Hayes, includes photos of the 75 (unexpectedly significant) objects, each with an accompanying explanation.

By my reckoning, some 20% of the objects featured in the book are packages. Maybe 16 out of 75. Okay, not all the objects included in my count are full-fledged retail packages—(like the Zippy bottle on page 22 or the Velveeta Cheese box on page 50, above). But how else would you classify an object like “a rock wrapped in a pie tin” (page 116) or a tiny piece of pottery (page 100) that turns out to be the perfect container for a specific broken marble?

Tell a new acquaintance that you design packages for a living, and you’re likely to get a blank look in reply. We’re surrounded by packaging, but, like water to a school of fish, it’s pretty much invisible to us as we’re swimming around in it. Still, with packages so prevalent in our environment, how could they not occasionally become meaningful to us? Not meaningful in the way that the designer or the manufacturer intended. Meaningful in some other, more personal way. Consider Jennifer Alden’s favorite glass jar:

I few years ago I started collecting jars. Not antique jars, but jars of pickles, jam, mustard, capers, maraschino cherries. I was inspired by my grandfather, who recycled food jars to store his nails, washers, nuts and bolts. A new jar calls out to me every time I shop at the grocery store. I take it home, and after we’ve eaten its contents, I gently wash it and removed its label by soaking it in hot soapy water.

Of the dozens I have collected, this one is the most beautiful, the most divine. I don’t remember what this particular jar held, and the only clue is some cryptic marks surrounding the number 7 on the bottom. The diameter of the jar’s mouth, the gentle rising threads, the width-to-height-to-depth ratio of the factory molded glass, it’s breathtaking simplicity, combine to create a sensation in my mouth, a taste in my throat, that I can’t make anyone else understand.

Taking Thing Seriously 
Jennifer Alden (page 96: glass jar)

I learned about this book via the related Significant Objects web site. The idea there is similar, except that, while the objects featured on the web site are real enough—(and for sale), the stories about them are fictional. Check it out.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Radioactive Gag Gift Packaging

The last chapter of Jerry Jankowski’s book, Shelf Space (modern package design, 1945-1960), is about “gag gifts.” These are usually conceptual affairs, in the sense that—(although the gag may be sort of dumb)—as a product, it’s little more than an idea contained in the package. One product featured in this “canned laughter” section of Jankowski’s book is a can of “Genuine Los Angeles Smog.” (See photos below)

From The Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection, this can of “Original Canned Radiation” is obviously the same basic concept. Selling an empty can of air as a sort of rueful attempt at finding humor in the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

“Canned Radiation” from Three Mile Island produced  by Brenster Enterprises of Etters Pennsylvania.

This was probably the most popular souvenir associated with the accident at Three Mile Island.

The six suggested uses indicated on the label were:

1. Remove label and tell your enemy its laughing gas.
2. Energy free night light (illuminates in darkness).
3. Mix with cold cream for that radiant beauty.
4. Instant male sterilization (sniff twice daily).
5. Use as a room air freshener.
6. Toothpaste recipe: mix 3 to 1 ratio with basking soda, for ever glowing smile.

ORAU Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection

The funny thing is, several of those bulleted points above are ideas that have actually been tried in the past for serious, non-gag products. (See: Radioactive Packaging)

Nice smog can from eBay, circa 1968 (“Buy It Now” price : $49.95)

(A different label design for “Genuine Los Angeles Smog,” after the fold...)

Matt King's Carnival Straw Cart Corrals

“Turbo” Matt King, 1999—Flexible straws, hot glue, packaging

I had just been reading about Sylvan Goldman’s invention of the shopping cart in Thomas Hine’s book, so shopping carts—(and how they are stored)—was already on my mind when followed a link to sculptor, Matt King’s web site.

Cart corrals—those ubiquitous steel structures peppered throughout the parking lots of America’s malls and supermarkets—are some of my favorite “found” sculptures. As objects that evoke both a whiff of the Wild West and the gluttony of contemporary consumerism, their presence always makes me chuckle. In 1999 I made 50 cart corral designs out of bendy straws and hot glue. They are as goofy as the original only smaller.

Matt King

A lot of his other work also uses products & their packaging as raw materials. (See: Blister Pack, SPF30, & Mergers)  A few of the sculptures from his SPF30 series even include folding chairs—the conceptual inspiration for Sylvan Goldman’s shopping cart invention.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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:

In about 1870, an inventor named Luther Childs Crowell patented machinery to create the flat-bottomed paper bag. Like the Canaanite jar, the flat-bottomed bag became a universal container.

... 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.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

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

Unpackaged

Health-food shop’s advertising cards are foil printed over used cereal & detergent boxes

The concept for the London health-food store, Unpackaged, is that they will sell you unpackaged produce and grains, etc. The customers are encouraged to come prepared with their own containers. While this concept is in keeping with current thinking about sustainable shopping, it is really not a new idea. This is exactly how shopkeepers used to do it. (As I just quoted The Encyclopedia of Ephemera in the previous post: One 17th-century London tea-man’s advertisement suggests that the customer should come provided with ‘a convenient box’)

The brand identity for Unpackaged was handled by London based design studio Multistorey.

It’s quite a challenge to brand something that removes the very thing that is the usual vehicle for branding — packaging. ... We developed a logo that uses a classic jar shape, a jar being a container that can be re-used an infinite amount of times and have universal use. It also introduces the idea that this brand is about packaging or rather the lack of it.

from Multistorey’s web site

(More photos after the fold...)

Early Tobacco Packets

J.K. Föhl painting from The Encyclopedia of Ephemera

With the (soon-to-be-signed into law) “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” here in the US, and cigarette packaging poised for some changes, I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at the origins of tobacco packaging.

The earliest tobacco pack? Pretty much just a square of folded paper as in the painting above.

Early shopkeepers, if they wrapped their wares at all, did so only nominally. One 17th-century London tea-man’s advertisement suggests that the customer should come provided with ‘a convenient box’. Squares of paper, normally reserved for the most unmanageable of commodities, were the universal standby. In this way, for those who shopped without convenient boxes, the problem of wrapping such products as pins, needles, snuff, tobacco, ink powder, sago, and the like was solved.

With the rise of shopkeeping and the growth of competition, it was only a matter of time before the square of wrapping paper carried a distinguishing mark.

The Encyclopedia of Ephemera
 By Maurice Rickards, Michael Twyman, Sally De Beaumont, Amoret Tanner

As explained to me by Virginia Bartow, curator of the Arents Tobacco collection, tobacco “trade cards” (not to be confused with tobacco trading cards) served a multitude of purposes. An advertising flyer, a shipping label—(so that non-literate delivery men could match the graphics on the label to the sign hanging outside the tobacconist’s shop)—and an ad hoc package.

(More tobacco trade card packaging, after the fold...)

A Collection of Cans

“A collection of cans (2009)” (found Ikea-shelf, cans found on Staten Island beaches, found pillows)

One of Tomas Ronse’s artworks from the Value Pack show: a collection of found cans in various stages of decomposition arranged on a discarded Ikea shelf.

Everything is collected in this world. In his book ‘Descent of Man’ (Penguin Books, 1978), T. Coraghessan Boyle tells a story about a man who collects cans and roams the earth in search of the rarest specimen. His “trophy room boasted an unblemished copy of every american can produced in the past four decades”.

The cans in my collection are anything but unblemished. His cans were worth a fortune, mine have no value. But which are more beautiful, more interesting? My cans have gone through a lot, they have a story to tell. I keep picking them up, wiping the sand from them, polishing them with my sleeve. I will need to find another shelf soon.

Why do we have the urge to collect? According to psychiatrist and neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, author of “American Mania: When more is not enough” (Norton, 2005), the reason is that our brain was formed during times of almost constant scarcity. The permanent threat of having too little, lead to a genetic encouragement of eating too much, of collecting possessions. But while we are made by a world of scarcity, we have created a world of potential abundance. We need to change. Guided by instincts, we become fatter and sicker, we stupidly continue to collect more money and things, even if we have more than we could possibly could spend or use.

Tomas Ronse, 2009

(Close-up photos of each shelf, after the fold...)

Miraculous Reliquary Packaging

The nice blue photo of the hand-shaped Diesel Bottle (via the Dieline) reminded me of a medieval arm reliquary. Not that I can claim any credit for making this connection. Thomas Hine discussed arm reliquaries (and their connection to packaging) in his book, The Total Package:

“... the reliquary does not merely protect and give visual expression to a precious though inert object through visual expression. Rather, the relic is an active ingredient, a tool that the devout can use to literally accomplish the impossible... Like many packages, the reliquary expresses not its ingredients but its power.”

Pictured in the top row, left: Arm Reliquary of the Apostles, (Germany, Lower Saxony, Hildesheim, about 1195) from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The x-ray to the right shows that this reliquary arm does indeed contain “One large fragment of an arm bone believed by the object’s creators to be the bone of a saint.”

Bottom row, left: another shot of the Diesel Bottle. (purportedly a cast of Diesel founder, Renzo Rossi’s hand); bottom right: an “on-going” artwork entitled “Reliquary” by John Salvest, begun in 1990  

...is constructed from a found glass hand and his own fingernail clippings, “began as a satirical homage to my Catholic upbringing and its odd history of venerating saint’s bones and splinters from the true cross, as well as an ironic commentary on the absurdly elevated status sometimes applied to artists in the modern era.”

He continues, “Every two weeks or so for the past eighteen years I have sat before the hand, opened its bright green lid, and dropped my freshly-clipped nails through its middle finger. Like an overturned hourglass, the hand is slowly but surely filled with physical evidence of my existence. What began as a light-hearted gesture has evolved into something else. Each deposit of bodily detritus into the jar is a bittersweet exercise. Generally speaking, we take satisfaction in the conclusion of our work, but in this case the completion date is unknown and not eagerly anticipated. “Reliquary” will only be finished when I am. With each passing year this habitual meditation on mortality has taken on added meaning as family, friends, and pets have been physically subtracted from my life.”

Arkansas State University news release, Aug. 22, 2008

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Pop Top Toy

I first heard about “audio branding” in Lucas Conley’s book, Obsessive Branding Disorder. Citing a number of audio branding firms, Conley writes about how the sounds of everything from X-box menu buttons to car blinkers to the crunch of Kellogg’s Cornflakes are now marketable branding channels.  (Historical precedent: Plop plop fizz fizz... Snap crackle pop, etc.)

And if all that is true, then certainly the sounds of packages being opened are being closely monitored, as well. So I thought that Bandai’s idea of separating the sound from its source and selling it as a product, in its own right—(Mugen Kan Beeru / Endless Beer Can)—was pretty interesting. Any Pavlovian response you’ve been conditioned to have when you hear the pop/whoosh of a can being opened—that response will be gradually undone by this toy that makes the sound, but does nothing to subsequently quench your thirst.

Judging from the way the boy & girl (in the sell sheet above) have their eyes streaming with tears, I’m guessing that they find this audio bait-and-switch pretty funny. The way the boy’s tears are rendered, however—I find that more worrisome than amusing.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Think Outside the Bottle

On left: Mayoral candidate, Bill Talen (Reverend Billy), Bottlemania author, Elizabeth Royte, and John Stewart (National Organizer for Think Outside the Bottle); center: mock water bottle labels, “Deception” and “Phoney Spring”; on right: Reverend Billy making exorcistic gestures towards a water bottle (photos from ThinkOutsideTheBottleNY’s Flickr Photostream)

The photos above are from the “Think Outside the Bottle” media event held last month in Union Square Park. Event included a taste test challenge to show that NYC tap water is fine and that New Yorkers need not depend on the bottled kind.

Two of the three people that box vox has interviewed—(Reverend Billy & Elizabeth Royte)—were both on hand to support this cause. I was sorry to find out about this only after the fact. If I had known about it before hand, I would have wanted to come. It looks like it must have been a pretty cold day for an outdoor “tap water challenge”. (Reverend Billy appears to start out with with his trademark white suit, but is eventually forced by February weather into donning a warmer jacket.)

Those outside of NYC may not be aware of this, but Bill Talen is now the Green Party’s nominee for Mayor of NYC. His candidacy was officially announced last week. His campaign website is up.

...We see the corporations waving to us. They are trying to catch our eye. Pepsico’s logo even stole Obama’s sunrise. But we sense the over-advertising, over-packaging, the depth of the debt. We have something so much more powerful calling to us. Our neighborhoods and towns might be healthy again, and our expansion-addled America could stop and live again with life. Our Life After Shopping!

–VoteRevBilly.org

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design