box vox

Two Golden Packages

Two golden packages: Helena Rubinstein “Gold Future” eye reviver cream jar (top) and Hennessy’s “Paradis Horus” Cognac bottle (below).

Freedom of Creations’ design for the “Gold Future” eye jar includes a flexible nylon helix that encases a smaller gold jar with a cap.

Ferruccio Laviani’s design for the “Paradis Horus” Cognac bottle includes an over-sized stopper that frames the bottle in a stylized overflow of golden liquid. (More images at Design Boom.)

Although gold packaging is pretty typical for luxury goods like cosmetics and liquor, the timing of these two recent packages may seem counterintuitive, considering the current economic climate. Why flaunt the golden excess of luxury packaging at a time when Wall Street is getting so much criticism over excessive bonus pay?

It may be, however, that this is the perfect time for golden packaging. The name “Gold Future,” while sounding luxuriously optimistic, is also a pretty unambiguous reference to the “safe haven” investment strategy of buying gold during times of economic instability.

Running against the trend to lighten packaging—(and its carbon footprint)—both of these designs use extra materials to create an illusion of solid gold plasticity. For the eye cream: a flexible golden skin that can be peeled off in a coil. For the cognac: a simulated geyser of golden liquid that can be popped off like a cork.

(via Lovely Package and PopSop)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Cigarette Pack Ashtrays

From Black Market Antiques: an ashtray designed to resemble a Camel cigarette pack. The package becomes the ashcan. Acknowledging the “negative moment” when the cigarettes are all gone and you are left with only ashes and butts, this faux cigarette pack suggests ways in which genuine cigarette packs, might serve double-duty as ashtrays.

The ashtray above seems intended as a portable, pocket ashtray, but there are ceramic table top versions (below, left) that also strongly imply that the ashes should go back into the pack.

From Fitzsu.com, (above, right) another variation of this idea: a generic flip-top-box-shaped pocket ashtray. “An interesting object on its own” according to their web site:

In the shape of a cigarette box, this all aluminum ashtray is an interesting object on its own. Or used, it may be closed and carried to another location keeping ashes and butts off the street and in your portable ashtray.

Not surprisingly, this concept has been suggested (and patented) for use in actual cigarette packs, but for some reason has never caught on. Perhaps it’s a testament to the negative power of the post-consumer-moment, that consumers generally want to jettison their waste a.s.a.p.

(Another cigarette pack with built-in ashtray, after the fold...)

Controller-Shaped Underwear Packaging

Upper photo: from AsusEpoxy’s PhotoBucket; Lower photo from Aksys Nation! blog

Search online for “underwear” + “control” and what do you find? There’s women’s “control underwear” (AKA: “shapewear”—descendants of girdles). There’s men’s scent control underwear (for hunters).

And now: underwear for gamers—this one packaged in an X-box controller-shaped tin. (Other shapes too.) Game tie-in product licensing, run amok? Or is there something more behind this underwear-as-gamegear trend?

Consider JennyLC Chowdhury’s Intimate Controllers:

“Intimate Controllers” is a platform where video games are played by couples touching each other.  The platform consists of two controllers, a bra for the female player and boxer shorts for the male player.  Each controller is embedded with 6 sensors placed with varying degrees of intimacy in relation to the body part with which they correspond. Players must pass game levels together and in doing so, game play results in increasingly intimate positioning. The goal of this project was to research and create objects that challenge the traditional notions and orientation of video game play.

from JennyLC Chowdhury’s Graduate Thesis for
NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program

(An Intimate Controllers diagram, after the fold...)

FBI Jr. Spy Toy Packaging

In our previous post, we focused on package-shaped cameras, one of which was a toy spy-camera in the shape of a Resse’s Peanut Butter Cap package. Further research turned up this collection of other “FBI Jr.” brand toys on Sam’s Toybox. 

Turns out that “FBI Jr. by Nasta” was all about spy paraphernalia designed to resemble soda & snack food packaging. (None of Sam’s toys are for sale.)

 

(Another Pepsi Walkie Talkies box—one that is for sale—after the fold...)

Packaging Cameras

Top row, left: Velveeta box camera from Allee Willis’s Blog; on right: Coke Can cameras from eBay;  2nd row, left: film canister camera via I New Idea; 3rd row, right: Fanta can camera from CircusCat’s photostream; center: King’s Cigarette box camera from Rick Soloway’s photostream; on right: instant coffee jar camera from eBay; 4th row left: chocolate milk box camera from Four Corners Dark; center: juice box camera from Zebriana’s photostream; on right: Budweiser Beer can camera (from eBay, I think); bottom row, left: Smarties camera from RockyCameras.com; on right: “Zeon Tech” Pepsi camera from Arthur Smokes’ photostream

There seems to be no end to the personal accessory categories in which you can find objects designed to resemble consumer packaged goods. We’ve already covered cigarette lighters, telephones and transistor radios. (Not to mention: salt & pepper shakers) Now we’re looking at package-shaped cameras.

Are they merely advertising promotions or are they products in their own right? Are they toys or another example of extreme brand loyalty?

(Another packaging camera—& the box that it came in—after the jump...)

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

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...)

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

Fractal Flip Top Box Dispensor

Another self-similar packaging display: Faisal A. Zakria’s 3D animation of a Marlboro cigarette-pack-shaped wall dispenser.

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...)

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...)

Electroluminescent Liquor Packaging

Upper left: Ballantine’s new electroluminescent label for blended scotch whisky; on right: TyKu’s sake bottle with LED light source; lower left: J&B’s “Mix Light” bottle.

Ballantine’s new “Listen to Your Beat” campaign includes an electroluminescent label with graphic equalizer display. Designed by London-based “The Core,” this label is more evidence of a trend towards animated, self-illuminating liquor labels. Similar to these battery-powered T-shirts, audio references seem to occur frequently in youth-oriented liquor packaging. (The J&B bottle above is another example.)

Battery powered, self-illuminating containers we’ve seen before—(See: NXT on the dieline and this article on Electroluminescent Technology from Packaging Digest)—but it seems to be gaining a particular foothold in the category of liquor packaging.

(One more photo and several videos of electroluminescent labels in action, after the fold...)

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

Buckyballs Packaging: Before & After

Maybe you’ve seen the YouTube videos of someone’s expert hands, artfully wrangling these magnetic ball bearings into different polyhedral arrangements. A fun crystal-structure teaching opportunity (and cool that it references Buckminster Fuller and fullerenes, AKA: buckyballs)

Zoomdoggle recently switched their packaging from a glass jar to a PVC box. (I met owner, Craig Zucker last August at Gift Fair and learned that the design of the new pack was handled in-house.)

(A Buckyballs display, after the fold...)

Von Buhler's Prize Capsules

Another packaging-related artwork from last weekend’s “Mapping Staten Island” show: Cynthia Von Buhler’s Cynth-O-Matic vending machine. This interactive sculpture caught me off guard and I was putting quarters into it before I had really sorted out my (art-consumer) choices carefully.

“This one has some color,” I thought to myself, “I’ll have one of those...” [turned the handle—made my first purchase] “Oh, it’s menstrual blood... hmmm, what were my other choices? Eyelashes, fingernail clippings, hair, pubic hair... OK, I’ll buy one more capsule, but I cannot be the guy who comes in here and buys only menstrual blood & pubic hair, so I guess I’ll have to go with the fingernails...”

The Cynth-O-Matic machine soon separated this doddering old fool and his money (Photos above by Debby Davis)

Although the capsules’ labels claim that their contents are “100% Genuine” I do have some doubts about their authenticity. As a collector, I don’t want to open these capsules (thereby diminishing their resale value) but, to my eyes, the fingernails look a little plastic and the red seems too bright. (Doesn’t blood dry out and turn brown?) Plus, hair and fingernails take a while to grow. We covered another reliquary type fingernail artwork (here) and, in that case, it took the artist a long time to accumulate a quantity of fingernail clippings. Of course if the contents of Von Behler’s capsules turn out not to be genuine then what I lose as fetish object, I gain in commentary on truth-in-advertising. Her website has this to say about the project:

Have you ever noticed that when you go to an art opening, many people are more focused on the artist than the artwork? Frequently, art viewers do not seriously look at the art. Usually they drink the wine, eat the cheese, and show more interest in the artist than in their art. The Cynth-O-Matic is the answer to this troubling problem. For 25 cents, you can actually have a piece of the artist.

(More photos and another of Von Behler’s package-related vending machines, after the fold...)

Trash Tracking & Landfill Packaging

Upper left photo from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory site; bottom left and right photos by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

“... once the product has been used up, and the package is empty, it becomes suddenly visible once more. This time, though, it is trash that must be discarded or recycled. This instant of disposal is the time when people are most aware of packages. It is a negative moment, like the end of a love affair, and what’s left seems to be a horrid waste.”

Thomas Hines, The Total package

The moment of packaging disposal may be a downer for the consumer, but after the garbage and recycling trucks pull away from the curb, those “suddenly visible” packages become invisible once more. What happens next is something that many people wonder about.

Elizabeth Royte, in her book, Garbageland, did the environmental sleuth-work of trying to track down exactly where her family’s garbage came to rest, after it left the curb.

Trash Tracking
Now, in yesterday’s NY Times, I see that researchers have begun using electronic tracking devices attached to individual pieces of trash to learn more about the fate of of what we discard into our municipal waste streams:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday...

Brett Stav, a senior planning and development specialist for the Seattle Public Utilities, which collects about 2,100 tons of trash and recyclables a day, said that aside from the help with logistics, he saw “tremendous educational value” in the experiment.

“There is this hidden world of trash, and there are ramifications to the choices that people make,” Mr. Stav said. “People just take their trash and put it on the curb and they forget about it and don’t think about all the time and energy and money put into disposing of it.”

Mireya Navarro
Following Trash and Recyclables on Their Journey
NY Times, September 16, 2009

(Liquid Soap bottle tracking map, landfill packaging song, and more, after the fold...)

Cream Top Milk Bottles

Bottle photos from DairyAntiques.com

A special Milk bottle shape from the 1930s with a cream-separating chamber.

“From the same bottle, either cream or milk instantly available—rich, whole milk for the children, or golden, thick cream... Have your milk delivered in the new, modern, sanitary Cream Top Milk Bottle—insert the handy separator and!... the cream pours off, the milk stays in the bottle.”

–Cream Top Bottle Corporation, Albany, NY

Left: Cream Top ad from 1935 issue of Good Housekeeping Magazine (from the Gallery of Graphic Design); lower right: another Packaging Zippo (from the Zippo Gallery)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Mason Jar Mousetraps

I saw this “Mason canning jar with lid converted to make a mousetrap, c. 1865.” on the website for Marilynn Gelfman Karp's book: In Flagrante Collecto, caught in the act of collecting. Similar to the later patent below. (Hope they cited prior art...)

I like these inventions that turn a package or a reusable container into something else entirely. The mason jar (or “fruit jar”) was, for a time, a standard, universal part that inventors could design their special-function lids to fit onto. Almost like computers and software: with the right lid/application, your mason jar could become a mousetrap or a minnow catcher, etc. Mason jars were like open source software. Freeware for imprisoning mice. (More rodent travails: here)

(Lots more mason jar traps, after the fold...)

Appliance-shaped Package

Aekyung’s prize-winning Spark laundry detergent package, designed to resemble a washing machine. (Winner of the 2008 Platinum Pentaward)

I like the idea of a product container that matches the household appliance in which the product is to be used. Nice how the die cut label even looks like a control panel. And while the door of this pretend washing machine is not actually how you open the container, it does makes for a great (and meaningful) window through which to view the package contents. It’s also touted as a convenient method for viewing the amount of product remaining, although I view this as a less important feature, since any consumer would more likely notice the amount of product remaining as they scoop the last few scoops of detergent from the container. (Rather than by peering at the closed container’s window from across the room.)

(via the dieline)

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...)