Box Vox

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March 8, 2011

Variety Pack Revisited

LandorSnackPak

A photo from AIGA’s design archives showing a couple of Walter Landor’s Kellogg’s Variety Pak boxes.

In Japan on a business trip in the early 1960s, Walter Landor and Mim Ryan, his young research analyst, stopped the car on the side of the road to admire a flowering bougainvillea tree. A dapper gentleman with a very European mustache, Landor was an admirer of all things visual, “from beautiful flowers to pretty women,” remembers Ryan. “He got out of the car and I saw him bend over toward the fallen blossoms and pick what I thought was a delicate flower petal. But when he came back to the car, he was holding in his hand a discarded candy wrapper he had found on the sidewalk.”

Landor was already a well-known packaging designer at the time. From his small waterfront office in San Francisco, “a funny little place,” says Ryan, “with a creaking staircase in the middle of the vegetable market,” he had redesigned the Benson & Hedges cigarette packs, the Sapporo beer can, and the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes cereal box (the famous one with the spoon and the rooster).

from Graphic Design History
By Steven Heller, Georgette Ballance

We featured a 1961 black & white television commercial about these little cereal boxes on boxvox back in 2009. Here now is a later one in color…

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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