box vox

Prescience of a Pop Culture Sketch

There aren’t too many pop culture references to graphic design (or the companies that sell it). This TV commercial skit with Rick Moranis from SCTV is one of the few that I can recall. I like that it has two punch-lines. First the shoe—then the terrible logo.

Originally aired in 1981, it seems even more pertinent today with online sites offering low budget “stock” logos and “logo templates,” etc.

Granted I do have a vested interest in opposing this trend since we design brand logos as part of our package design service, but it only stands to reason that a logo purchased for $50 will not be as carefully crafted as it really ought to be.

It’s depressing the number of small startup companies that come to us for package design only after having already obtained one of these low-budget logos. Saying in effect: “You should charge us $50 less because we already have a LOGO.” —(Here, I’m imagining the word, “logo” pronounced as Rick Moranis does in the video.)  Anyway, it just seems like one of those penny-wise and pound-foolish business decisions that people sometimes make.

Interestingly, the skit was also prescient in its particulars. There are now at least two companies that I’ve found that are actually using the name “Logos Galore.” One is based in Australia and one is based in Michigan.

This might be an example of life imitating art—a case of “reverse product placement” for the service sector. Or it may just be coincidence. Although, for a current company name, “galore” sounds very vintage—(circa 1950s)—the words “logo” and “galore” do have those sound-alike syllables that make the combination sort of rhythmic and catchy. I can imagine more than one person thinking of it without ever having known about the SCTV sketch.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Wacky Packs: Right or Wrong?

In a recent post about LTL Prints’ Supergraphic Wacky Packs, I fretted about whether the juvenile satire of Wacky Packs made certain consumer products look bad. (And whether a Wacky Pack decorating motif for our office would be off-putting to clients.)

For some people, however, the more culturally significant question is whether Wacky Packages, themselves, are a good or a bad thing.

PRO: In an episode of Unwrapped (above), Wacky Packages are given a very favorable spin—(despite the vaguely Hoarders-like compulsion to collect that the Wacky Pack collector profiled in the piece exhibits).

CON: Michael Chabon, on the other hand condemns Wacky Packages as a commercial co-opting of kids’ gross-out humor.

“'I Remember how it felt, at the time, to open those first packs of Wacky Packages stickers: delicious, incredible, pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong can be.”

Michael Chabon
Details Magazine, December 2005
(via The Boston Globe)

This article also appears in Chabon’s 2009 book, Manhood for Amateurs as the chapter entitled, “The Splendors of Crap.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

As Seen on TV

Blister-pack/clamshell wrap rage is old news, but Larry David manages to give it a terrifying new geopolitical spin when (in Season 7, Episode 2 of Curb Your Enthusiasm) he asks, “What am I, Mohammed Atta, I gotta get a box cutter?”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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...)

Die Cut Windows

Top left: the open “O” in Organa’s label (designed by Copenhagen-based Rosenstand & Co.) works as a portal showing the product contained, and because of the darkening color at the edge of the window—looks as if the edges of the label were being somehow moistened by their proximity to the beverage; top right: Templin Brink’s redesign for Target store’s Archer Farms packaging uses die cut shaped windows —each one incorporating a view inside the box into an illustration of an animal on the outside. (Using the contents to make a kind of collage.); 2nd row left: London-based Big Fish’s design for Dorset Cereals used die cut grain shapes providing multiple windows into every box; to the right: BBQ sauce by the We Love Jam company uses a simple circular hole as a meaningful (if not actually necessary) peephole (via the Dieline); to the right: Azul Amuchastegui Bari’s concept for a birdseed box package that uses a bird-shaped die cut window to reveal contents and amount the remaining during use. (via Sylvain Allard’s Packaging | UQAM blog); Fire Road Wine (MM tells us this was designed by The Creative Method) uses a similar trick to the Organa label: ink color at the edges make it it seem as if this label’s appearance is the result of natural forces—in this case fire; bottom left: Israel-based Nine99Design’s die cut wine label uses a drip-shaped window through which you see actual wine (or not, if the bottle is empty); to the upper right: (via the Dieline) Sullivan Higdon & Sink’s design for Shatto Milk Company’s “Milk Soap” uses die cut windows to allude to milk bottles, signaling the product’s key ingredient; bottom, center: Migros meat package (by Külling Identity AG) uses a steer shaped die cut window to say “beef”; bottom right: Waitrose mustard labels (by Lewis Moberly) also speak about the contents of the jar with its dollop-shaped window.

Conceal or reveal?

Although some deceptive souls will use packaging to conceal the true nature of a product—a great deal of packaging shows that a lot of ingenuity and effort goes into actually revealing the product contents.

Plenty of boxes have die cut windows in various functional and abstract shapes. But I particularly like it when a label or a box reveals a portion of its content in a meaningful way. The shape of the opening, while technically a “negative space” where something has been removed is really an opportunity to say something positive about the contents of the package.

Some current examples above. Some vintage examples below.

With one exception (where noted) all of the above photos are from Dan Goodsell’s astonishingly useful online archive of vintage commercial ephemera: The Imaginary World. Top left: Rocket-shaped window for Brach’s Candy; top right: a dressmaker’s-dummy-shaped window for Trimtex Rayon Rick Rack (from Janet McCaffrey’s Primrose Design blog) 2nd & 3rd rows, left: 2 catastrophic, heat-related windows for “red hot” type candies; 4th row, left: Hopalong Cassidy uses a lariat/lasso to create a window into his licensed drinking straw package; to the right: a house-shaped Halloween-theme box for cellophane bags uses a square window-shaped window— (pretty much bringing the metaphor full circle); 5th row left & center: boy and girl Crystal Sugar Spec boxes, each appear to use a pair of die cut cellophane eyeglass-shaped windows, through which one views the candy sprinkles inside; to the right NuFizz instant soda pop package uses bottle shaped die cuts to reveal foil packets—using the package usually associated with soda in those day to signal a soda that doesn’t come in a bottle (its smaller-carbon-footprint was, perhaps, ahead of its time); bottom left: the box for Pactra’s water color set evokes Tom Sawyer, circa 1950s with its window through wooden fencing; Pearson’s 80 Spooky Stix box uses a die cut window that serves as a view both into the pirate’s treasure chest illustration as well as into the actual box—the same contents for both. (Now, empty.)

(Die cut TV and faux die cut windows, after the faux fold...)

Packaging & Cigarette Lighters

For those who think that carrying around branded personal effects is a recent cultural development, consider the promotional cigarette lighter. More popular when smoking was more popular, plenty of smokers apparently did not object to carrying a reminder of a product they liked. Or perhaps they just liked getting free stuff and accepted the advertising as part of the [free] package. This Reddi Wip lighter is from Roadside Picture’s Flickr Photostream. He says he got it on eBay for $20 and sold it for $150.

It certainly has its charms. Packaging whip cream in an aerosol can was a novel innovation at the time and people seem to love product names with cutely misspelled words. The miniature package must look pretty appealing, magnified in its little aquarium of lighter fluid.

I was going to leave it that, but then I got to wondering how many other package-related lighters were out there. (“Sigh”... see below.) The cigarette pack of course is an obvious one, but it was surprising how many products, unrelated to smoking, found their way onto cigarette lighters. Just goes to show how, at one time, it was a pretty safe bet that you could hand out promotional cigarette lighters and plenty of consumers had a use for them. (Think: Don Draper at Sterling Cooper)

All of these pictures above are from eBay. Since the auctions will soon be over anyway I’m not going to go crazy and link to them all. (If you want to own one of them—an eBay search awaits you!) The one comment that I’ll make is about the bottom row, 2nd from the left: “hair spray” seems an odd choice for a look-alike package/lighter, since hair spray is known to be so dangerously flammable.

(Some surprising new “packaging lighters“ after the fold...)

Package as Metaphor (Part 5)

Top: a 1959 Coca-Cola ad from RoadsidePictures Flickr Photostream; 2nd row, left: Barnum’s Animals Crackers from The Imaginary World; to the right: an ad for “Zoo Mac” animal-shaped egg noodles from Tracie*s Retro Flickr Photostream; bottom left photos: Fuzzy Wuzzy Bath Soap from eBay; to the right: circus train “Animal Crackers” photos from The Imaginary World

5. Package as Vehicle

The package is a little vehicle that the product rides around in. This idea might not seem like such a fundamental packaging metaphor at first glance. But to the degree that packaging is all about transporting products to distant & far flung consumers, it makes perfect sense.

Surprising how much vintage “circus wagon” packaging there was. (I remember the Barnum’s Animal Crackers boxes, but the others are new to me.) Not all the vehicle-packs I found were as vintage as these “circus wagons.”

Cars, trucks, buses, vans, rockets and a plane and a flying saucer, follow, after the speed bump...

Maverick Branding?

Some “Maverick” brands, including automobiles, boats, bikes, wine, e-books, Madonna’s record label, Monsanto’s herbicide, and cigarettes

In an earlier post about the packaging of Sarah Palin, alluding to the Republican campaign’s efforts to redefine themselves as the “maverick brand,” I had not fully realized the irony of using the words “maverick” and “brand” in the same phrase. Both words have, over the years, acquired new meanings.

Maverick started out as the name of real person, Samuel Augustus Maverick—

...a Texas lawyer, politician, land baron and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. His name is the source of the term "maverick", first cited in 1867, which means independent minded. Maverick was considered independent minded by his fellow ranchers because he refused to brand his cattle.

Wikipedia

The term, branding, as we in the package design business use it—brand identity, retail brands, brand packaging—comes directly from the practice of American ranchers branding their cattle to distinguish theirs from the herds of neighboring ranchers.

The unbranded cattle of Samuel Augustus Maverick came to be known as “Mavericks” and the word has gradually become a generic term applied to “anyone who could not be trusted to remain one of his group.”

As someone who preferred his cattle, non-branded, Samuel Augustus Maverick might almost be compared to Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo” (an influential book in the anti-branding movement—see: Branding in Your home)  The fact that his name has become a generic term and no longer refers specifically to him, is sort of reminiscent of what happened to the Band-Aid brand.

(More about mavericks and branding, after the jump...)

Canned Water

Anheuser-Busch ran into a bit of a PR-SNAFU after Hurricane Katrina, when their contribution of canned drinking water [1] to the post-Katrina relief effort was deemed by some to be self-serving and inappropriate. They had included a large Anheuser-Busch logo on an otherwise generic can. (An example of the criticism: here)

For some, the humanitarian benefits were overshadowed by the negative impression of a company using disaster relief as a branding opportunity. Evidence of corporate cynicism or a blog-o-spherical tempest in a teapot?

Reminds me quite a bit of the “Anonymous Donor” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David not only ‘adopts’ an African-American family, whose home had been lost to Hurricane ‘Edna,’ but also contributes enough money to have a new "Larry David” wing built for The Natural Resources Defense Council.

His altruism is called into question, however, when Ted Danson [2] also donates money for a new wing, anonymously. By contrast, Larry feels that his motives are being unfairly impugned and that Danson’s contribution is “anonymous” in name only. (Since everyone seems to know full well that it was Danson’s contribution that built the “Anonymous” wing.)

With that in mind, it seems like Anheuser-Busch’s biggest sin was a lack of subtlety. A generic, non-branded can would have appeared more altruistic. And, as with Ted Danson, word would have gotten around about where the water came from.

Footnoted digressions:

1. In my interview last month with Bottlemania author, Elizabeth Royte—(here)—in explaining why PET bottles helped to make bottled water so popular, she alluded to research which proves that Americans do not like the taste of water from aluminum cans.
2. Does it strike anyone else that the current practice of people “playing themselves” in fictional story lines is a kind of product placement?

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Pretend Product Packaging

Just as I am working on a post about fictional product packaging—or reverse product placement—I start seeing posters for this new goth-inspired energy drink, Tru-Blood. Only it’s really a campaign for “True Blood,” a new TV show on HBO.

Still, if the show is a success, it seems like only a matter of time that this will become a real pretend product—(like Willy Wonka candy bars, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Brawndo Energy Drink, etc.)

Although all the bottles and labels are red, the product line is differentiated by letter, according to the different blood types—(O, A, B, & AB).

(Designed by  Campfire)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Fluff Does Line Extension

This may not be late-breaking news. For all I know, there may have been Strawberry Marshmallow Fluff sitting along side of regular Fluff for several decades now. It is news to me, however: original Fluff, Strawberry Fluff and [I understand there is also] Raspberry Fluff.

I like the logical, workman-like way that this line extension was done—a change of color here and there, strawberries (rather than a spoonful of Fluff) as the illustration tucked into the overhead compartment of the “u”—the single letter in “fluff” without an ascender. I like the nostalgic vibe of the two typefaces that “marshmallow” and “fluff” are set in. Before you know it, you've got the Fluffernutter theme song jingle running through your head.