box vox

Ron English: Popaganda Shopdropping

Ron English is the artist who created the zipper/banana album cover mash-up that we wrote about last January.

More recently he’s been doing some cereal box package design (i.e.: art) which he’s been shopdropping into supermarkets. These “popaganda” food repacks are subversive in the same dumb sort of way that Wacky Packages were: creating momentary consumer confusion and adding a satiric, negative spin to trademarked food brands.

Some commentators have taken the cereal series as nutritional agitprop in opposition of childhood obesity. I’m not sure that English’s agenda is so politically correct, but I could be wrong.

The fun part of shopdropping, however, is when consumers puzzle over the aberrant branding messages and, in some cases, blithely purchase them.

Part of the reason I prefer not think that English’s messaging is sincerely literal is the “Sugar Diabetic Bear” below, which in my (diabetic) view is amusing, but not entirly accurate. Yes, Type 2 diabetes can be brought on by obesity, but what about Type 1 diabetes? Eating sugar certainly didn’t cause my diabetes. (See: Diabetes Myths)

(One more thing about Ron English and diabetes, after the fold...)

Bread Loaf Lunch Box

From Gasoline Alley Antiques: a lunch box that looks like a loaf of sliced bread. (Available on their website for $400)

Conceptually similar to Robert Brownjohn’s cigarette package design that we discussed earlier this month.

Or it would be if this were a bread package. The idea being: the outside of the package serves as a precise diagram of the contents, almost as if the package were transparent. Except that—(just as in the food photography for some unphotogenic frozen entrée)—there’s an opportunity to show a more idealized version of the contents than would be seen through an ordinary transparent package.

And because trompe l’oeil packaging is so fun, the consumer won’t mind being fooled.

(Bread Loaf Lunch Box also comes with a package-related thermos, after the fold...)

More Packaging Clothes

Dapper Beer label by dd|a (via: Lovely Package); Nutella jar with football Jersey shrink wrap (via: PopSop); Debbie Marks’s Sexy Undressing Salad Dressing (via: Packaging of the World)

A small fashion show: more examples of the packaging-as-clothing metaphor.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Helmut Smits’s Drum Kit (& other package-related works)

Drum Kit, 2003 (tin cans, metal wire)

“Helmut Smits is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.”

Not all of Helmut Smits’ work is package-related, but enough so that, if I were a more patient and strategic man, I could cherry-pick images from his web site to feature here—one at a time—for quite a while. Instead, I’m presenting them as I found them—all at once.

On On left: “0.26 Gallon of Oil” 2007 (1L Coca-Cola bottle filled with oil) Photo by Lotte Stekelenburg; on right: “The Real Thing” 2006 (An installation to filter Coca-Cola into clean drinking water.) Photo by Rick Messemaker

Above are two separate works from 2006 and 2007 that each involve Coca-Cola. When I look at these now, in 2010, because of what’s going on right now with the on-going BP oil spill, I cannot help but associate both of these artworks with that.

“I liked the fact that oil looks the same as Coca-Cola. One is: the product that America dominates the world with [Coca-Cola], the other is: the product that America consumes the most worldwide [oil].”

–Helmut Smits from an interview in Chief Magazine, Issue #7

The Coke bottle full of oil, I had assumed, was a reference to the petroleum used to make PET bottles. Like Luis Camnitzer’s “Coca Cola Bottle filled with a Coca Cola Bottle” here, too, a bottle that contains what it is made of. This, of course, is exactly the sort of negative connotation—(conflating Coke with crude oil)—that Coca-Cola was hoping to address with their recent “PlantBottle™” initiative.

In “the Real Thing” Smits ironically treats Coca-Cola as if it were polluted water—an impurity to be removed so that the water can be made “clean” enough for drinking again. (I’m guessing that, for the foreseeable future, Smits will not be one of those artists, invited by Coca-Cola to design a “limited edition” designer bottle.)

Below, Smits takes a more benign view of “roll-on” deodorant packaging...

(Several more of Helmut Smits works, after the fold...)

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

Cross-Category Packaging (Part 1: Cans)

Sometimes a product is put into a package, borrowed from another product category. Clothing, sold in cans, for example. I call this “cross-category” packaging. The motivation behind this potentially confusing marketing move? Partly a “category disruption” to stand out on the shelf and partly a flippant novelty to charm the consumer. Why flippant? Because canned goods have acquired a humble, sometimes humorous connotation. (Canned music; canned laughter.) A cross-category “canned” product mocks itself and invites us to share in the joke.

Sometimes the category hopping seems arbitrary—(why a bra in can? why not in a bag or a box?)—other times there’s an underlying logic. Malted milk balls packaged in a milk carton, for example, to highlight a key ingredient. (milk)

The Levi 501 Jeans in a paint can, I first saw via Lovely Package. These seem like an example of the “arbitrary” approach—(unless they’re “painter’s pants”)...

I wish I could remember where I found the Voyeur brand store-packaging, but I give up. (Try searching online for “Voyeur” + “underwear” and see what you find.) Voyeur’s canned underwear packaging takes the “flip-novel” approach, although the graphics appear to be totally in the manner of Barbara Kruger and I wonder whether she’d approve of that.

The Paint Can pinhole camera is a little different. A different type of packaging camera from the ones we featured earlier—here the can is the camera, although the connection between photography and house paint seems to be of the “arbitrary” type. Still, the can is pretty important since the package is pretty much the product.

Many times, when a product is cross-categorically packaged in a can, the can is an essential part of the concept and is featured in the name. (As in: “Any Product You Can Think of in a Can”) This also ties into the idea of packaged “kits,” where batches of items are kitted together into a convenient (or humorous) product concept. Think: ”Party-in-a-Can,” “Bed-in-a-Bag” and the like.

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

ZIPit Packaging

Photos from a review of the ZIPit in The Gadgeteer

I saw another packaging-related product at Gift Fair: the ZIPit battery operated clamshell package opener.

Unlike some manufacturers in this product category, they wisely avoided the negative irony of packaging their product in clamshell, opting instead for a paperboard carton. Not a prize-winning graphic design effort. (Might also be mistaken for a Glad garbage bag box.) Still, it does communicate the “As seen on TV” vibe that this product embodies...

The thing is, this is not the only “Zip It” product on the market. As is often the case with trademarked names, there are a number of other “Zip It” retail packages to be found in other product categories...

(See more Zip It packaging, after the fold...)

Salt, Pepper & Packaging

Featured in Jerry Jankowski’s book, Shelf Space, this box for The Squirt Company’s 1955 advertising premium was intended ...

to promote its “exciting new kind of soft drink... with fresh fruit flavor you can see!” Side panel storyboards show where the fun, novelty shakers could be used ...

Namely: in the kitchen or at a barbecue or at a picnic. But probably not at your dining room table. At least not in 1955, quite yet. (See: Branding in Your Home)

The idea of miniature packages serving as salt and pepper shakers has a certain logic. Salt & pepper shakers are, after all, nothing more than containers. Why bother transferring the contents of one container into another?

Vintage mini salt & pepper shakers from mrybuckler’s Flickr Photostream

And needless to say, in encouraging consumers to go for that convenience, there was also a branding opportunity. And yet salt and pepper represent a duality that, the Squirt Company (and many others) chose to ignore. I know one can sometimes distinguish between opaque salt and pepper shakers by the number of holes in the top. But rather than having two identical mini-Coke-can-shakers on the table (see below) wouldn’t it have made more sense to have two differently branded shakers for salt and pepper? Say, regular Coke for salt and Diet Coke for pepper?

Top left: Can-shaped Coke shakers from iCollect247.com; top right: beer can shakers from mrybuckler’s Flickr Photostream; 2nd row left: another set of Squirt salt & pepper shakers in a different box from Ruby Lane; 2nd row, center: Kaiser Stuhl shakers from Squatters Antiques; 2nd row, right: 7-Up shakers from JazzeJunqueInc’s Flickr Photostream; bottom left: Pillsbury flour-bag-shaped shakers from JazzeJunqueInc’s Flickr Photostream; bottom center: Fort Pitt Beer shakers from Astrycula’s Flickr Photostream; bottom right: Corona Beer shakers from Sabenien's Flickr Photostream

(More curious salt & pepper packaging, after the fold...)

Juice Box Style Liquor Cartons

Much like the milk packaging that I found in Colombia, South America, I also noticed these small cartons of liquor to be very different from what we typically see in the US. Like the Motts example sitting next to it, we usually see these cartons in the form of juice boxes. I’ve haven’t seen this carton style used for liquor before, I’ve only come across small bottles that are miniature versions of their full size cousins. If you’ve seen them used like this else ware, be sure to comment. (More pics after the jump)

Rainbow Array Packaging

Top left: Jones Soda photo from Desirable Redhead’s Flickr Photostream; on right Sanity by Australian design firm Percept; 2nd row: scented Pine Sol; 3rd row left: Naturapoteket vitamin packaging by Swedish branding and design firm BVD; on right: Jean-Louis Bissardon fruit juices labels by French design firm, Caracas; bottom row left: Uno Hair Wax jars by Shiseido in Japan; on right: Mr. Clean

No question, color is a useful way to differentiate between varieties in a product line. Sometimes it’s to help communicate the contents—(fruit flavors, vegetables etc.) Other times it’s more about how great the products will look all together on the shelf. (a rainbow assortment of iPods, etc.)

Colors may speak to the consumer on a more emotional level, but clearly all the colors will not sell equally well. Some colors will not be reordered as frequently. Some may be discontinued. The multi-colored product line has lately become so de rigueur, that I wonder whether a spectral array of products really stands out much any more. Do multi-colored product lines sell better?

Some product line packaging, while still multi-colored, shuns the obvious choices (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) in favor of more subtle, not-so-intense pallets: pastels, tertiary colors and beyond. That may be a step in the right direction, but I applaud those that experiment with different means of differentiation—patterns or typography for example.

If it’s food your selling, I get it. The oral/visual appeal of appetizing color cannot be denied. But why the delicious-looking, candy-colored cleaning products?

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design