packaging as content

July 19, 2010

Presidential Packaging as Op Art

(Not optical-illusion “op art,” but opinion/editorial op-ed art.)

Yesterday’s batch of editorials in the NY Times, about President Obama’s prospects for a future term, were illustrated with satirical cleaning products.

By no means is this the first time we’ve compared our President to packaged goods. These black & white packages above (by Abbott Miller and Kristin Spilman from Pentagram) hark back to an earlier book cover for The Selling of the President 1968 (on right).

One thing I’m puzzling over—the illustrations are definitely black & white in my edition of the the paper and online, but in Richard Shear’s copy, the illustrations were apparently in full color, or so he claims.

Either Connecticut is getting a much fancier edition of the NY Times than they deliver here on Staten Island, or there is some powerful, packaging/color synesthesia at work here! (Such that: we’re so accustomed to seeing brightly colored packages that, even when they are reproduced in black & white, our minds supply the color.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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