box vox

Purple Cow Packaging

Vintage Holloway’s Purple Cow candy wrapper from Jason LieBig’s Flickr Photostream; William’s Purple Cow Lager can from The Beer Can Guide; Milka Chocolate’s purple cow shaped folding carton (via: Packaging of the World); a vintage “purple cow” fruit label for Washington apples for sale on eBay ($250)

Based on an 1895 poem by Gelett Burgess, a “purple cow” generally meant something “out of the ordinary” or something you don’t see every day. As depicted in these vintage packages, each with its whimsical cow illustration, the concept was fine.

I’m not so accepting of the new over-arching definition of “purple cow” as something remarkably innovative, as set forth in Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Because of this book, some people are now calling any ground-breaking, category disrupting product a “purple cow.”

For some reason, I find this new meaning a loathsome thing. To me, the name “purple cow” diminishes the hard work of innovation, making it sound like something merely capricous.

I doubt Steve Jobs would ever have given one of Apple’s products as insipid a name as “purple cow” and yet all over the place there are people now saying that the iPad and the iPhone are “purple cows.”

You need look no further than the scapbooking craft company The Purple Cows to understand the uncool connotations that this name carries.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

A “Penny Machine” for Christmas

Photo via: The National Museum of Play

Above: something I once wanted and didn’t get. Anyone who grew up celebrating a consumer Christmas has one of these. Not necessarily this toy in particular, but something they wanted for Christmas—something they asked Santa Claus for—and did not receive. The “Penny Machine” is the one that I remember.

I had forgotten that it was called a Coney Island Penny Machine, I’m pretty sure it was just a “Penny Machine” that I told my mother was my number 1 Christmas wish. Clearly, the Remco television commercial below was what sold me on this product.

I must have been a pretty avaristic child to want a toy that endlessly dispensed other toys. Sort of like the trick of using your wish to ask for more wishes.

I hadn’t remembered the commercial being so olde-timey. I don’t think I would have identified much with the boy in the commercial, although I totally identify with the boy on the box—(who looks just me at that age). Perhaps it was the fantasy of impressing a girl with my skill in winning prizes that explains this commercial’s effect on me. Never mind that the carnival attraction, in this case, would have been located in my toy box.

Whatever desires it unleashed in me, my mother didn’t seem as impressed with this product or its commerical. Had it been a birthday request, I might have worked harder to persuade her. With Christmas, however, I figured it didn’t much matter what she thought about it. As long as I was right with Santa, it needn’t concern her. My record of good behavior stood for itself and made me confident that the Remco prize-dispensing machine would soon be my prized possession.

I know this sounds a lot like Ralphie and the Red Ryder BB gun in “A Christmas Story” which is embarrassing, but remember: in that movie [spoiler alert] he ultimately got what he asked for. The significance of not getting what you ask for is different.

Not that I’m whining about it now or that I had gotten everything I ever wanted up until that Christmas. But it’s the first thing that I can remember specifically asking Santa for, that I later noticed I didn’t get. Which raised certain existential questions...

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

The Entenmann’s Box and Its Discontents

Some websites credit Martha Entenmann with having invented the “see-through” cake box. Other sites (including Entenmann’s) say it was a collaborative effort with her three sons.

Believing that people were more inclined to buy what they can see, the Entenmann’s brothers, William, Robert and Charles, and mother, Martha, invented the familiar “see-through” cake box for baked goods in 1959.

Entenmann’s Direct

This insight transformed Entenmann’s business:

Quality baked goods used to be sold in white paperboard boxes tied with string, and only someone with X-ray vision knew what the treats within actually looked like. Then in 1959 Martha Entenmann, wife of the son of the Entenmann’s bakery founder, had a brainstorm — people were more apt to buy something if they could actually see it. Working with her sons (who’d joined their mom in the family business after serving in the Korean War), she developed the first cake box with a plastic “window.” The new box allowed the company to display its product on standard supermarket shelves, rather than relying on the limited “under glass” space available in independent bakeries. Instead of taking a number and waiting for a busy salesperson, consumers could browse among all the various “see-through” boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, powdered doughnuts, and crumb cakes...

Metal Floss

Recent changes to their packaging, however, have now irritated some loyal customers...

(The backlash of the discontents, after the fold...)

Margarine Penalties

During margarine’s long prohibition, the product was variously outlawed, taxed, prohibited from being colored and required to be colored pink (until “pink” was ruled unconstitutional).

As with alcohol’s prohibition there were “bootleggers.” Some served time.

Above left: the mug shots of Charles Wille, John L. McMonigle and Joseph Wirth who all served time at Leavenworth Prison in the early 1900s.

Center: a photo from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of three Wisconsin women loading a car trunk “with cases of oleomargarine outside an Illinois supermarket near the state border in December 1964.”

On right: an anonymous margarine smuggler from New Brunswick...

Dad and mom smuggled margarine from Maine as it was illegal to have coloured margerine in New Brunswick. I can remember that they took the panels on the car doors off and stuffed the doors full and then put the panels back on.

Kill Everything

In 1918 Frank W. Tillinghast, president of the Rhode Island based “Vermont Manufacturing Company” was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for coloring margarine to resemble butter (and therefore: “tax evasion”).

In 1901 Tillinghast had testified on behalf of margarine in hearings for “The Bill to make Olemargarine and Other Imitation Dairy Products Subject to the Laws of The State or Territory Into Which they are Transported, and to Change the Tax on Oleomargarine” (H. R. 3717).

During margarine’s “pink” period:

In 1890, the Vermont legislature prohibited the manufacture of oleomargarine in that state, and specified that it could be sold in Vermont only if colored pink. In 1891 Minnesota, West Virginia, and New Hampshire passed similar laws. Not long afterwards, an alert Minnesota oleomargarine S.W.A.T. team carried out a pantry raid and confiscated a quantity of not-pink oleomargarine that had been imported from Missouri by Armour Packing Co., a New Jersey corporation.

The Pink Oleo Saga
Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy

Wisconsin’s anti-margarine laws have enjoyed a long run:

Yeah, that was in the late ’70s. Up until 1981, it was illegal to sell dyed margarine in Wisconsin. We had these white bricks that looked like lard. It was awful and no one wanted it. So, once a month, I’d drive to Illinois to get dyed margarine, load up the station wagon, and distribute it to the neighbors.

Will Durst

Canada is another country with stingent margarine regulations of surprising longevity:

Agriculture Department inspectors swooped down on four Wal-Mart stores in the Quebec City area yesterday and seized 72 plastic tubs of yellow Becel margarine with an estimated street value of $179.28.

Quebec seizes yellow margarine
Montreal Gazette, November 5, 2005

(More about margarine as contraband, after the fold...)

Oleomargarine Coloring Packs

Above are the patent drawings showing William E. Denison’s “coloring berry” which seem to match the Delrich Margarine EZ Color Pak.

Denison’s was one of many efforts to solve the margarine manufacturer’s problem of being legally required to sell their “artificial butter” in an uncolored form. Aside from the dye-containing “berry” there were many other designs for margarine coloring packs, designed to let the consumer take the final step of mixing in the coloring. To make the margarine look less like lard. 

A couple of packages shown below even use dye-filled syringes, although I think those appear as more of a manufacturing note and were not meant to be included in the package.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

The Margarine Squeeze-Mix EZ Color Pak

The EZ Color Pak (for Cudahy’s Delrich margarine) and the Pliofilm “Squeeze-Mix” margarine package: two versions of a package that would never have existed except for the strength of the Dairy lobby in getting laws passed that prohibited margarine from being pre-colored to resemble butter. (The loophole being, that consumers could color it themselves.)

Never mind that butter itself was often artificially colored yellow—to make it look more like what it actually was.

Unsalted butter and whipped butter are almost as white as margarine. Should we then make the butter industry pay a tax on white butter, which looks like margarine, in order to be sure that the housewife who wants margarine does not get fooled Into buying butter? ...

During its many years of trying to exist despite artificially created handicaps, the margarine industry has demonstrated the type of creative and inventive ability that few other food industries have displayed. Its latest effort to overcome the discrimination against it is truly remarkable. ... The margarine industry has introduced a color pellet into the margarine container and by merely kneading the bag in which the margarine is sold, the housewife can color the margarine.

Oleomargarine: Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture
House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, 1949

Albert Lowenfels (whose work for Hotel Bar Butter we were just looking at on Monday) while clearly a “butter man” has also defended margarine’s right to be yellow. In 1952 he came out publicly in support of repealing the laws regulating margarine’s color.

(More about Lowenfel’s defense of butter’s chief competitor, after the fold...)

Poetry, Hotel Bar Butter & The Communist Party

Albert Lowenfels (who invented the triangular prism-shaped butter package that we looked at yesterday) had a brother: Walter Lowenfels, a poet who was imprisoned under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era.

“Well, Walter,” I said, “I’m here to find out about you.”

“Then you should ask me about butter,” he obliged. “When I was young, I was in my family’s butter business. In my autobiography I wrote:

For me, butter was a huge, independent world, as self-contained as a spiral nebula. It was the galaxy of business.

...I decided that... I’d rather die as a poet than a butter man. so I told my father I was going to quit his business. He just couldn’t believe it, and he said: I want you to get checked up physically. I said okay; so he told me to go to a doctor, who asked me to bring my book of poems and a urine specimen. When I got to his office, this doctor told me to lie down. (It turned out that he was a psychiatrist!) I told him: ‘Look, I’m going to Europe. My father is the man who’s sick, try to take care of him.’ So my father sent me to another psychiatrist who told my father that I should see Dr. Freud. My father said he’d pay for it, but I never went. I took a slow boat to Spain and never got to Vienna.”

Village Voice, Jan. 16, 1978

But he did get to Paris where he continued writing poetry and became part of the Paris avant-garde. There, with Michael Fraenkel, he established Carrefour Press, which printed anonymous works.

Fraenkel and Lowenfels became excited by the idea of total anonymity in art, deciding to found their own press and publish unsigned books. They believed that gaining recognition in art was like competition in business  ... To get their “anonymous” movement going, Lowenfels and Fraenkel each contributed work...  A number of writers, including Kay Boyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Michael Arlen, expressed interest in the venture, but no manuscripts were forthcoming.

Walter Lowenfels Biography, Bookrags

With WWII Walter Lowenfels’s creative energies were once again drawn into the competive galaxy of the butter business.

Lowenfels and his family returned to the United States in 1934, moving to Mays Landing, New Jersey. Lowenfels returned to his father’s butter business and worked alongside his brother, Albert. During that time, Lowenfels introduced new ideas to the business; he invented a new waxed paper packaging for butter and he applied date stamping to improve the butter’s freshness. At night and on the weekends, he continued to write poetry.

Yale Library

I’m guessing that it was Albert who submitted the patent for Walter’s waxed paper packaging and that this is it...

Although his work at Hotel Bar Butter sounds creative in some ways, Lowenfels was not happy about returning to work as a “butter man.”

He wrote to Henry Miller about the transition from poet to businessperson: “I butter from nine to five and then I change into a butterfly and go ahead with poems.”

from Wikipedia’s entry on Walter Lowenfels

(Walter Lowenfel’s arrest, after the fold...)

Cutting Open Toothpaste Tubes

While researching the previous post, I happened to see this photo on CopyRanter which reminded me of those earlier toothpaste tube dissections we admired in 2009.

I was wondering how this tube was cut apart so cleanly when I found the photos below, clearly showing that it is by freezing a tube of toothpaste, that this is acomplished.

The motivation for cutting up the toothpaste tubes above appears to be intellectual curiosity. (About the stripes.) But consumers are cutting up toothpaste tubes for other reasons, as well.

While manufacturers have stealthily shrunk packaging capacity, many consumers, desperate to get everything they can out of the package, have resorted to scissors.

Addressing the need to get every bit of the toothpaste out of the tube, Guo Lili proposes adding a nick (for tearing) to the base of a conventional toothpaste tube — giving the package a sort of Achilles heel.

In contrast to the simplicity of this design, consider the complexity of Crest’s “Neat Squeeze” container below, invented in 1989 by Van Coney.

(Neat Squeeze, after the fold...)

Real & Imaginary PANTONE Package Design

Seeing Room Copenhagen’s new “Pantone Universe” products at Gift Fair (like the multicolored, Mobius-strip shaped hangers above, left) set me to thinking about all the various and sundry packaged Pantone products—real and imagined. (Poster illustration on right is by Base Design)

Although many graphic designers seem to identify with this brand, it always seemed to me that the market for multicolored PANTONE accessories ought to be a pretty small niche. There would undoubtedly be brand loyalists who would happily eat, sleep & breath the PANTONE logo, but those consumers should be far fewer in numbers, than, say, consumers willing to wear a Coca Cola logo.

Pantone is ubiquitous in graphics departments around the world, the metric by which designers define just the right shade of blue for the Gap's logo (Pantone 655) and the perfect pink for Barbie's (Pantone 820). Pantone chips likewise help Kellogg's enhance a cereal box to stand out on the shelf by using "spot" colors more vibrant than the mixes that emerge from the standard four-color printing press.

Allison Fass, “The Color of Money”
Forbes, 2003

Still, despite a certain backlash tendency, there seems to be no shortage of licensing deals and creative energy expended in this direction.

Personally, I find the PANTONE color system a bit kludgy and cumbersome.

Their solid color matching system requires that printers have a set of 14 different PANTONE approved base color inks, in order to correctly mix all of the admixture hues and tones. To me, this is like some inelegant logarithmic table, compared to the simple and logical algebra of CMYK— with 4 process colors.

For certain colors, however, specially mixed solid color inks will be much brighter than CMYK combinations. Correctly specifying those “spot” colors has become increasingly important for retail consumer packaging and for that PANTONE has no competition.

Real and imaginary PANTONE products are generally much more effective when displayed in a multicolored group. (See: Rainbow Array Packaging)  Although PANTONE cannot trademark the idea of a color assortment, in the minds of many designers, color = PANTONE.

Graphically, these package designs are usually minimal, based as they are on the layout of a tiny color chip swatch with PANTONE’s Helvetica logo and identifying code number.

(1,114 examples, after the fold...)

Foundry

Also found at Gift Fair: Packaging for Tatine Candles “Foundry” line. The industrial vibe of these chipboard boxes caught our attention. The company’s founder explains Foundry’s package design this way:

“FOUNDRY Materialized from my love of industrial warehouses, design, and objet’, vintage motorcycles and the men who ride them, and of course, Rock n’ Roll. I admire history and craftsmanship in old buildings + things, how they were made and how they work. The collection reflects heavyweight found objects, completely handmade and re purposed in recycled glassware with vintage motorcycle racing numbers. The thick recycled chipboard box includes a copper grommet and leather pull...

The concept was in my head and designed and collaborated with perfection by the darling Becki, my beloved designer.”

Margo Breznik, Top Notes (The Tatine Candles Blog)

“Becki” referred to above, must be Rebecca Snyder of A La Mode Designs—(the same firm that designed and developed the Tatine Candle website.)

“On press” on left; “die” for die-cutting the boxes, on right

We weren’t the only ones who admired Foundry’s package design. It won “Best in Show” for NYIGF’s 2011 Extracts category.

(One more photo, after the fold...)

Package Design on Your iPhone

Inexplicable drawn to Zero Gravity’s both at Gift Fair. When I saw some of their package-design iPhone cases, I figured that’s what must have been calling to me. Not all of their phone cases are designed to resemble consumer packaged goods, but enough so that it raises some questions. We’ve seen other cases of devices being made to look like packaging... cameras, radios and, yes, telephones.

But since Apple is unlikely to come out with cross-branded varieties of iPhone, if you are determined to possess a Velveeta iPhone, it falls to 3rd party venders of iPhone accessories to meet your needs.

Of course, there are also other package-related iPhone cases with different degrees of DIY.

Joanna Behar was experimenting with a candy-branded iPhone—(candy wrappers placed underneath a transparent iPhone case)...

In both of these examples—Zero Gravity’s faux-packaging and Johanna Behar’s DIY candy branding—the glossy plastic surface belies any sincere intention to fool the eye. These are still coveted hi-tech gadgets—with a glossy veneer of ironic low-brow branding.

Another DIY example: “Randomly Ross” has a Flickr Photostream about making iPhone cases from juice boxes and also offers them for sale on ArtBoxe.

Here’s a case in which the packaging cover serves a more truly undercover role:

“I was trying to find a material to make a case for electronic devices that would be durable, but not attract attention. Truth be told, the thing that first attracted me to juice-boxes is that they are ubiquitous and uninteresting. If someone looks into your purse and sees a book, some keys and a juice box, they aren't going to take the juice box. What if they see a brand new iPhone?”

In titling this post, it struck me how “Package Design on Your iPhone” could be interpreted two ways: as a covering to put on your iPhone and as an activity to do on your iPhone. Then I wondered, is there an app for that?

And I’m not the first pose the question. (See: Richard Shear’s Free iPhone package design app)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

 

Worm Bottles

“Worm bottles”—3 kinds:

1. The Lucas Gusano Liquid Candy Bottle

On left: photo of Lucas Gusano candy bottle by Elías Arriazola Lujambio; on right: Lucas Gusano packet & “Salsaghetti” (from Brian Temple’s Flickr Photostream)

You may recognize the Lucas Gusano bottle as another “accordion bottle” of the type we were looking at yesterday. (“Cool collapsible container contracts like an accordion!”)

The segmented shape of the bottle, however, in this case is also a metaphor for “gusano” — the Spanish word for “worm”— specifically, for the type of segmented larva that may or may not be a valid addition to certain alcoholic beverages made in Mexico.

Interestingly, this product also comes in a packet as a hot “salsa” sauce for the gummy worms of Lucas’s “Salsaghetti” candy. Mixing flavors, food ethnicities and metaphors with equal abandon, this candy-as-Mexican/Italian-spaghetti-as-worms product also includes a bit of cross-marketing in the form of a “Gusano” packet. Note how the packet features an illustration of a squirting Gusano candy bottle. (See also: Lucas “Crazy Hair” Candy)

2. Casta Gusano Real Reposado “Worm Bottle”

Casta Gusano Real Reposado is a tequila that comes in a figural, worm shaped bottle, but among true tequila aficionados, the reasons are controversial.

These whimsical bottles always turn a few heads. This product used to be called Gusano Real but the name was later changed to “Casta — Worm Bottle.” When I first saw these I thought they were a major tequila blunder propagated by one of the most common myths and misnomers about tequila. The fact that you’re reading this page means you probably know there are no worms in tequila at all (worms are put in some brands of Mezcal) and thank goodness there is no worm in this particularly good reposado. However, Gusanos (worms) commonly live inside agave plants, and this being a 100% Agave Tequila, distilled & bottled in Mexico, is, I’m sure where the image comes from. Plus a cool looking bottle doesn’t hurt if you’re marketing Tequila.

Poco Tequila

That’s right. It was never tequila that was supposed to have a worm. It was mezcal. (Sometimes.)

It is a misconception that some tequilas contain a ‘worm’ in the bottle. Only certain mezcals, usually from the state of Oaxaca, are ever sold con gusano, and that only began as a marketing gimmick in the 1940s. The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis that lives on the agave plant. Finding one in the plant during processing indicates an infestation and, correspondingly, a lower quality product. However this misconception continues, and even with all the effort and marketing to represent tequila as a premium—similar to the way cognac is viewed in relation to brandy—there are some opportunist producers for the shooters-and-fun market who blur these boundaries.

Wikipedia entry on Mezcal

Which brings us to #3...

3. Bottles containing worms

On left: Gusano de Maguey in a bottle, waiting to be added to finished Mezcal (via: Wikipedia); on right a mini-bottle of Mezcal with large gusano (photo by Bud Spencer)

Alternate photo caption: Why settle for one measly worm at the bottom of a bottle of mezcal when you could be enjoying an entire jug?

Conclusions? If you’re like me (too old for gummy worms, but have not yet even tasted mezcal), I say: “Don’t get pressured into eating the souvineer gusano!” Choosing not to ingest this 1940s marketing gimmick does not make you culturally shallow or otherwise inauthentic. It just makes you less of a carnival geek.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Accordion Bottles

As with yesterday’s look at “accordion packs,” although there is one example here of a literally accordian shaped bottle from eBay, accordion bottles, for the most part, are those bottles with expanding/contracting, bellows-like features.

Prior to digital photography, photographers had the option of storing their darkroom chemicals in “air reduction” bottles which “expand and contract depending on amount of contained liquid to ensure it’s air tight and lasts longer.

There are also collapsible sports bottles, sometimes in the shape of a ball.

The bottle shown in the lower left of the photo above is Tnuva Milkshake’s 2003 “Accordion Milkshake Bottle.”

By using the new flexible ‘accordion’ bottle space saving technology the customer stretches to full capacity the flexible bottle only when he wants to consume the product, then the customer shakes the firm closed bottle to desired foamy structure and then only the customer opens the bottle.

via: Global Packaging Gallery

Sometimes accordion bottles are used as syringe-like dispensors, as with the Kuhn Rikon cake decorating bottles below.

We also featured a 2008 collapsible carbonated soda bottle concept by Swerve that was meant to prevent soda from going flat (similar to the darkroom “air reduction” darkroom chemicals bottles), but in recent years, the accordion bottle has been continually reinvented as a space-saving ecological solution.

Here are five examples:

1. Oto Musalek and Josef Zboril’s 2005 “NDC PET” bottle:

My idea was to make a bottle whose volume could be easily reduced. It was obvious that it should fold like an accordion. But the first prototypes did not work because of certain properties of the plastic, so I had to adjust the design of the bottle.

via: Radio Prague

 Their idea also includes an unusual non-adhearing label concept which is intended to make the bottle more efficiently recyclable.

Its design enables an easy separation of the raw materials — the bottle, the label, the cap — and a simple condensation of the empty bottle. Its label is not fixed with adhesives but it is just put on the bottle’s neck.

via: Czech Design

Their patent appears to be for sale.

2. Brengt Brummer’s  2009 “Pop Bottle” is actually a water purification device, and may be a bad example of the accordian-bottle-eco-space-saving idea. It’s ecological, but not by virtue of its recyclability. Like those sports bottles we mentioned above, its collapsibilty has more to do with convenience. Still, it’s a cool looking bottle...

The water filtering system introduced by Bengt Brummer is designed for active users in different environments where the water quality cannot be considered as safe. Dubbed Pop Bottle, the dynamite shaped water bottle has the ability to collapse and expand as required.

via: siahdiar.org

3. James Hart’s 2009 “Twist Bottle” is an accordion bottle, by way of origami:

“This bottle was influenced by collapsible origami cylinders and aims to change the way we interact with plastic packaging. Aesthetics have been improved, whilst re-use has been encouraged and made more enjoyable.”

(2 more examples, after the fold...)

Diet Coke & Package Design Blogs

We received a mysterious Fed-Ex package on Wednesday (from Minneapolis-based Fast Horse) containing a 12-pack carton of “limited edition” Diet Coke, designed by Turner Duckworth. There was also a matching Diet Coke tote bag and a card that read in part:

“We’re excited to share with you our brand new look for fall before it hits the shelves. As a trendsetter in the fashion and design world, you are getting the first glimpse. Knowing you have great taste, we‘d love to hear what you think of our new look.”

We don’t usually get much in the way of swag, so I’m duly flattered for box vox to be among the package design blogs, selected to receive this. It would be nice to believe that (in some small, unprofitable way) box vox might be considered “a trendsetter” but it also provides us an interesting glipse into one small marketing initiative of the Coca-Cola Company.

I imagine similar packages have also been received by The Dieline, Lovely Package, etc. Richard Shear has already beaten everyone to the punch and blogged about it last Wedneday on The Package Unseen. But OK, I’ll bite...

Half Empty or Half Full Disclosure: As a diabetic package designer, the only kind of soda I ever drink is diet soda and most of the diet soda that I’ve consumed so far has been Diet Coke. Already the 12-pack of soda is nearly all consumed—(not that I didn’t have some help). Is this a conflict of interest or does it give me insight? Does a far-fetched, aspirational desire for Coke, as a client, color my analysis of their new package design? Does the free soda pop taint my judgement or does it deepen my review to have tried their product in its new packaging? 12 Times.

Before, we opened the carton, having only seen pictures of the can from one angle, I had imagined that the can might be another “Incomplete Package” —a fragmentary package design with the potential to create a larger “whole” display, as with the red aluminum bottles with the large Coca-Cola script wrapping around the sides—(also by Turner Duckworth.)

As it turns out, the largest legible display you can create is still just a small part of their logo spanning two cans. Certainly this logo is familiar to consumers, and it’s a testament to Diet Coke’s dominance of the market that they can experiment with such an extremely abbreviated version of their logo. Unlike some new fledgling brand, they can be confident that consumers will immediately recognize even a tiny portion of their logo. Not that the logo, in its entirety does not appear elsewhere on the can. Smaller versions do appear. (Four times.)

The 12-pack carton, on the other hand, with its diagonal can spanning the edges, fits squarely into our Incomplete Package category. Taken individually, each carton shows only a small fragment of the new can, but if three cartons are stacked a certain way, it’s possible to build a picture of the entire can.

Not that they necessarily intended for supermarkets to stack them up like this. I’m guessing that sideways aluminum cans are not as structural strong as upright (or even upside down) cans. A super-ambitious wall of cartons stacked in this way might be a bad idea. See: 8-Bit Soda Display (Although a smaller 3-high counter display might be safe and effective.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Writing on Packages

While technocentric consumer culture continues its swoon over QR code packaging and the branding dialogue that it supposedly opens, there may be another trend worth noting: writing on packages.

Earlier this Summer, I noticed this huge speech bubble on the back of a box of Special K and I thought, “What on earth is that for?”

Reading the back of the cereal box, I learned that the big blank area was part of their “What will you gain when you lose?” campaign — (i.e.: when you lose weight). Consumers are invited to answer that question by uploading a picture of themselves with what they were hoping to gain—their “goal”—written on their box of Special K.

The gallery page of photos on the Special K website discloses that “some of the images are of paid participants.” I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that the women seeking to gain “Sass” and “Pep” may be in that category. (See also: Pep Brands Packaging)

Of course with any interactive marketing push of this type, some consumers may push back, as illustrated by The Restless Mouse’s message in the lower right hand corner. Not the sort of affirmation Special K was seeking, but a more meaningful show of strength, perhaps, than the word “strength” compliantly written on a cereal box muscle.

Another example of the writing-on-packages trend is the Budweiser Light “Write-On Label”—here the campaign doesn’t require online consumer feedback, although they do allude to “social networking”...

(More about “Write-On Labels, etc., after the fold...)

On the “Stree” Where I Live (Pornographic Branding)

In a way, this one’s a follow up to Karen Abel’s PBR flowers. Like her, I found some discarded packaging in an empty planter. Unlike her, I’m not thinking of making these into flowers.

Unusual to see such a sexually explicit illustration on a retail package. If this were a trend, what would we call it? Pornographic branding? Pornographic graphic design? (See also: Packaging Junk)

At first I thought it was a condom package—a common enough form of litter in our neighborhood.

Printed on a fancy holographic foil stock... Muti-national flag icons lined up in a row, but all the text was in Japanese so I couldn’t read what it said. I searched for the UPC number in Google and learned that it’s a Japanese patent-medicine sex-pill called “Stree Overlord” (sometimes misspelled as “Street Overload”) Not a condom package, after all.

It turns out that this product is one of many mysterious “herbal” products sold at the deli on our corner, even though there’s evidence online of the FDA intercepting imports of Stree Overlord because “Required label or labeling appears to not be in English” and because “The article appears to be a new drug without an approved new drug application.”

But those aren’t the only regulations that Mayo Kaisha Pharmacy Export Ltd. is flouting. They are also trampling trademark law. The two characters on the box are Chun-Li and Ryu from the Capcom video game known as “Street Fighter.”

Interestingly, Stree Overlord’s own trademark is also being infringed upon. Their web site has one page complaining:

“It has come to our attention that Stree Overlord has become so popular that many have decided to duplicated and copy from us to try and take away what we have worked so hard for.”

(There are now counterfeit versions of the product being manufactured in China.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
 

Jonna Pedersen: Product Stories & the Inner Lives of Packaging

As branding experts tell it, “narrative marketing” is the best way to sell something. “Tell the product’s story,” they say, “and consumers will listen.” But whatever story the brand chooses to tell, there are other, more personal stories that consumers will also hear.

Danish painter, Jonna Pedersen, explaining her recent focus on packaging, says, “To me, the outside says something about the inside. It’s all about reading the barcode.”

A product logo can unleash half-forgotten memories and sensations. We have all had this experience. Expressing the zeitgeist, consumer products can become cultural icons. Product graphics and packaging obviously matter. Visual impact and narrativity characterize those products that are deemed “classic.”

...A consumer product’s iconography is always ambiguous... A product’s packaging inherently carries a visual or textual content signaling what’s inside. There is no controlling the meanings and values that the consumer subsequently attributes to the product. That is entirely dependent on an individual’s baggage and frames of reference. In principle, the product is open to uncontrollable added meanings.

... Jonna Pedersen’s stories about consumer goods are more than representations of actual objects. They are images of our time. Familiar objects from our cultural heritage are interpreted and painted: graphic imprints and sensual experiences with numerous cultural, social and geographical references. Images of uniquely Danish products alongside images of exotic products, Greek olives or American ketchup, tell a story about an upheaval in Danish (food) culture.

Excerpts from Bente Jensen’s essay, “Product Stories”
from the book Documentary, Jonna Pedersen: Painting

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Kooky Kans

From the “Mixo” dual oil & vinegar bottle of the previous post, we now turn to a different Mixo whose “Kooky Kans” are the latest enterprise of serial entrepreneur, Mike Becker (who previously founded Funko and Flapjack Toys.)

Mixo’s first product line, Kooky Kans combine the look and nostalgia of tin lunch boxes along with the fun of your favorite action figures. I’m filling my Kooky Kans with two things, delicious candy or our super amazing instant playsets we call Kookycraft. Kookycraft is kind of like Japanese Origami meets cereal box cut-outs... of the 60 & 70s.

Mike Becker, Chairman of Fun

 An example of Kookycraft is shown below...

 

Note the can-shaped man in the apron. This is Mr. Mixo, the presumptive company mascot. I was struck by his uncanny resemblance to another anthropomorphic packaging mascot: the Big Shot soda jerk...

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

Bassett’s Horehound Troches

On left: photo from Sheaff-Ephemera; on right: a photo from eBay

Bassett’s Horehound Troches: another product from the same company that sold Bassett’s Egg Shampoo Cream.

“Troches” is a word we don’t hear much these days. If this product were around now, the word would be “lozenges” or “cough Drops.”

Would have been nice to find a photo of their 25¢ “elegant glass bottle” (a torpedo bottle), but this bottle-shaped trade card is all I could find online.

Before starting the Basset Supply Company, Albert G. Bassett was in the drug store business. Judging by the last line on the back of the trade card, Horehound Troches were also sold on trains.

(See also: Die-Cut, Package-Shaped Recipe Booklets)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Empty Cans of Dehydrated Water

Top row, left: from EraPhernalia Vintage . . . (playin' hooky ;o)’s Flickr Photostream; on right: from David Reeves’s Flickr Photostream; 2nd row, left: via BackpackingLight forums; on right: via No Budget Films; below: from Sweetheartville’s Flickr Photostream; bottom: from ohkayeor (Lovin' our cool weather)’s Flickr Photostream

Our friend Mr. Ronse recently brought a gag gift known as “Bernard Dehydrated Water” to my attention.

Packaged as if it were a canned food product, this item is clearly a part of that larger category of gag gifts: packages, containing ephemeral contents. (See: Rob Walker’s recent Design Observer post, “Rarified Air”)

The thing that’s unusual in this case is that “dehydrated water” seems to be the only novelty product of an otherwise legitimate food company: Bernard Food Industries.

Apparently on the market since 1962, their dehydrated water beverage is the only gag gift mentioned in a long list of trademarked applications for their standard label design. Also interesting, is how they’ve stipulated their trademark’s use for “novelty gift items, namely, empty cans.”

(Some trademark documents, after the fold...)