WrenchMints come in a “Wrench Shaped Tin Box” designed and patented by company founder, Eddy Rubin.
It first struck me as an oddly oblique concept for a mints package to be wrench shaped, but once I saw their tag-line —“When your breath is broken ... fix it!” — I could appreciate the craftsmanship of its inner logic.
(Rubin’s design patent and one more thing, after the fold...)
Stopping by Trapp Candle’s booth at Gift Fair, I spoke briefly with Catherine A. O’Kane, a co-inventor of Evoque Candle’s patented box — a container whose lid is, itself, a container with its own lid.
A candle box for storing individual candles and candle accessories. The box includes a housing with a top opening, a tray for storing candle accessories that fits within the top opening of the housing, and a slidable lid for covering the tray. The housing has a bottom and four side walls that define the top opening. The tray has a bottom integral with four tray side walls that, when placed within the opening of the housing, engage the interior surface of housing side walls to create an airtight enclosure. The lid has a top cover and three side walls, two of which are adapted to slidably engage any two opposing side walls of the tray. The top cover includes a snap-lock for engaging one of tray walls when the lid is in the closed position.
Inventors: Joseph M. Rowley, Jr., Catherine A. O'Kane
Assignee: Faultless Starch-Bon Ami Company
I like the phrase “slidably engage” and I like the idea of a container serving as a lid for another container. (See also: Corks as Containers)
(The patent follows, after the fold...)
Another inherently fractal display pack: the “Toblerone Bulk Candies” box by Ducart Packaging Industries. Prism-shaped box containing prism-shaped candies.
The individual candies, however, are in wrapper-packets rather than their trademark triangular boxes. Which is probably less expensive, but (sadly) serves to make the whole package a little less self-similar.
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
From Lynn Hoyt’s “Midnight Coiler“ Etsy Shop: Cork Cubbies™
Another recursive packaging concept that could be taken to further mind-boggling iterations: each smaller cork, a potential container also in need of corking—on and on into infinity.
But, come to think of it, the way she’s doing it is perfect and succinct.
(See also: Fractal)
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
Two things relating to the Package as Pixel thing:
1. An embossed tin Campbell’s Soup sign (circa: 1900–1910)
“A gorgeous and rare embossed tin sign for Campbell’s Soup, predating Warhol’s Pop Art by half a century is an attention getter. Most of these signs were destroyed when public opinion of the day deemed it to be a desecration of the American Flag. It comes to the Julia block with an estimate of $10,000/15,000.” [Sold for $18,400]
2. From Canstruction New York 2010: a large Campbell’s Soup can made out of canned food — including other, possibly competing brands (e.g. Hunt’s Sauce).
Similar to Mary Campbell’s Food Can Mandala, Canstruction’s sculptures are later dissembled and donated to community food banks. (See also: Bean Can)
(One more thing, after the fold...)
Bombay Sapphire Layers Christmas Edition (via: Packaging of the World)
Super multi-layered packaging. On the one hand, it attracts and intrigues us. [See: surprise ball] It heightens the ritual of opening. So many layers—what the hell is in here? The diamond ring that comes in a refrigerator sized box.
On the other hand: super wasteful. So much packaging for such a little thing. You’re Amazon.com and your customers are getting pissed off. (photo below from Tamaraberg’s Flickr Photostream)
Sometimes the concept is naturalistic. (e.g. the layers of an onion) Other times, recursive like Matryoshka dolls (Russian nesting dolls).
A McDonald’s coupon promotion (via: PopSop)
(More layers of nested packaging, after the fold...)
Continue reading "Nested Packaging: Surprise Balls & Russian Dolls" »
In case you were wondering what kind of packaging a soda-can-shaped, soda-can-containing mini-fridge might come in, the answer is provided, here...
(After the, fold..)
top: Black-on-white eyedazzler seed jar, c. 2000 (Photo via: Vassar.edu); lower photo from eBay
Another type of helical container: Dorothy Torivio’s “eye dazzler” seed jars.
Dorothy’s idea for this design came from a pottery shard she found on the Acoma reservation. Originally, she says, it was a series of simple squares, half white, half black, so she called this idea the “Day and Night” pattern. In this interpretation, the square has become a rectangle, actually a parallelogram, and executed in one of her famous spirals. Her trademark is executing the same number of geometric shapes, regardless of the variance in circumference.
Photo on right via: Tribal Expressions
Although “eye dazzler” was originally used as a derogatory term by 19th Century collectors of Navajo rugs—(who preferred the earlier, subtler colors to the bright colors that later became available due to railroads)—Torivio’s work (like early “Op Art”) is mostly black and white. Dazzling in pattern, but ascetic and restrained in color. (See also: The Bridget Riley Look)
It is impossible to analyze the mathematical precision of these designs, which she works out in her mind and puts directly on the pot. She looks at a pot, visually divides it in half, then in quarters, then eighths, sixteenths, and more, and keeps dividing until there is no room on the surface. After the mental gymnastics, she begins to paint the pot...
...One day Dorothy was having an exhibition of her pottery in his gallery, at which she was being honored. A man approached her saying that he was a mathematics professor, and he had been trying for a long time to figure out on his computer how she did the designs until he finally arrived at the solution. Whereupon Dorothy laughed, pointed her finger to her brow, and said, “My brain is my computer.”
–Susan Peterson, Women Artists of the American West
(More Torivio seed jars, after the fold...)
Continue reading "Dorothy Torivio’s Avant-Garde Seed Jars" »
One of the liquid smoke companies whose bottles we featured in the previous post was Figaro out of Mesquite, Texas. (Now owned by Baumer Foods). Another early Fagaro label (above) features some before-&-after “old way—new way” illustrations that seem very similar to illustrations used by Kauser & Brother.
But the special feature of this label is the inclusion of a Droste effect bottle. (See: Droste Effect Packaging) I don’t have any closer view of this label, but it clearly duplicates the same bottle with the same before-&-after illustration, on a smaller scale. (And, presumably, on and on into infinity.)
On Monday, we’ll be featuring a few more Droste effect packs that have eluded me up until recently.
(Another photo with vintage Figaro jugs, after the fold...)
I’ve been intending for a while to do a little survey of recent polyhedral packaging. Sylvain Allard, in his Packaging UQAM blog, shows a great affinity for geometric solutions to packaging problems. So it seems fitting to start with something from there.
1. Laurence Gregoire’s proposed chocolate packaging, above, features a triangular package that unwinds into a string of 10 connected prism-shaped boxes. It’s a sort of fractal pack since the shape of each part is similar to the whole. (And the logo looks like the second iteration of a Sierpinski triangle.)
2. New Zealand-based Steph Baxter’s proposed “recycled tissue” packaging is reminiscent of some recent triangular Kleenex boxes. Except that, in her design, the prism-shaped boxes are tied together in a hexagonal set of six. Also: her graphics tell a 6-panel story about recycled paper.
4. Nescafe display packaging by Alberto Vasquez of igen Design and Éva Sümegi & Richard Nagy of Co&co Communication: cube-shaped carton unfolds into a triangular (prism-shaped) POP display.
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
“Cross-category,” in the sense that cookies and baby clothes are not generally packaged (or displayed) in milk cartons.
As discussed in our previous post, cookies are sometimes marketed as an accompaniment to milk. (And vice versa.) While Mother’s Cookies are not, themselves, packaged in a milk carton, the milk-carton-shaped P.O.P. display (above, left) poses the question: “As long as you’re buying milk, why not pick up some cookies?”
The self-similar Freshwear display (above right) makes a fractal point about its unconventional packaging for baby clothes.
The Mother’s Cookies Milk Carton Display was created by Harbor Industries, Inc. (via: Creative)
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
A fractal-pack idea from the high concept section of London-based The Core’s website...
Designed to resemble one of the building blocks it contains, this self-similar Jenga box could, itself, be stacked like Jenga blocks for an in-store display. (More about how packaging can be fractal: here, here, here, here, here, here & here)
(Note: I extracted the single box on the right from The Core’s picture of stacked boxes below.)
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
Queens-based artist, John Norwood’s pyramidal sculptures from collected Marlboro boxes. Another example of an artist making use of materials at hand—which often turn out to be used packaging. (See: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) In this case, of course, the medium is also evidence of the artist’s smoking habits and brand preference.
Similar to Marlboro’s own puzzle 4-pack package and other packaging mosaics—(see: Peter Blake)—Norwood’s geometric stacking arrangements seem related to Marlboro’s iconic design. The sculptures follow the same diagonals as the arrow-like “red roof” graphics on the cigarette packs, themselves. Norwood’s fractal-like arrangement uses the packs to create larger, somewhat diffused versions of themselves in a manner similar to Tom Friedman’s reassembled boxes.
(More, after the fold...)
Not the first time we’ve mentioned rats (or mice) here on box vox and, as previously disclosed, I myself, once had a pet rat. Given to me by another rodent-loving classmate at RISD, “Lucky” played a starring role in my friend, David Wilder’s video, illiteRAT. Hadn’t seen this tape in over 30 years, but I think its conceptual rigor still holds up.
And it was nice for me to see the little feller again, after all this time. (I don’t really remember what the cereal box looked like that Lucky’s Alpha-bits came in. Lets just say, for arguments sake, that it was the one on the left—photo from The Imaginary World—with the mouth-shaped, faux die cut window.)
In my last year at school, I lived in an office building in downtown Providence where I’d let Lucky scamper, dog-like, about the loft. It’s surprising how frisky a rat can be.
I recall eating a lot of ice-cream cones one Summer. (This was before I found out I was diabetic.) I got into a habit of methodically reducing the size of the ice-cream cone—keeping it in classic proportions—until I had formed a miniature, rat-size ice-cream cone. This, I would then present to Lucky and he’d grab it in his hands and eagerly finish it off. (Sort of fractal, now that I think of it...)
Sadly, my free-range policy of giving Lucky the run of the place, ultimately led to his demise. Turned out there were dusty old trays of rat poison under the radiators, that I didn’t know were there.
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
Photo of car on right from Gothickma’s Flickr Photostream
Cadbury’s foil-wrapped, creme-filled chocolate improvement upon the egg—the very egg, which many regard as sufficiently “perfect” in its own right. And then, as if to guild the Easter lily even further: a Cadbury Creme Egg shaped car. Another package-shaped vehicle. (Also see: vehicle-shaped packaging.)
And this ‘humorous’ clip about the car—(doing the self-similar, fractal thing, as well as the packaging costume thing).
(More egg-shaped vehicles, after the fold...)
Winner of a 2007 Pro Carton Special Prize: Absolut Bärbar by Hanna Nylén of the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and Louise Gustafsson, a former student at the Nackademin Upper Secondary School, both from Stockholm.
Self-similarity between packaging and contents.
(Self-similarity between store-display and packaging, after the fold...)
Photo of a bottle house in Sultana, CA from Matt (mister Goleta)’s Flickr Photostream
Why fractal? Because, as both a bottle-shaped building and a building made out of bottles, it has “self-similarity.”
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals.
This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package... Like Russian dolls.
Left: the front panel of Cocao package for which the “Droste effect” is named. Right: An old Royal Baking Powder package which also illustrates the effect.
Since so many products are nearly indistinguishable from their packaging—(a tube of ChapStick, a can of Coke)—I figured that there would be lots of examples. My brief supermarket survey showed me otherwise. It’s quite rare. You can easily find packaging that includes packaging pictures, but it’s almost always a picture of the inner packaging—(the outside of the box shows the packets contained within)—or else it’s a cross-marketing campaign where pictures of other packages in the product line are shown—usually on the back.
(more photos after the jump)
(First, a little background about me & mice...) When I was a kid I used to keep pet mice. It all started when the garbage man in my neighborhood in Sarasota, Fla. (around 1964) handed me a coffee can with a lid. Inside the can was a live, tame mouse. My mother let me keep him. (Later, in college, I graduated to pet rats, but that’s another story.) I mention my first pet mouse only to acknowledge that I have a continuing affection for rodents and to fully disclose my conflicted feelings about pest control products.
At Home Depot last month I lingered for a quite a while in the pest control section thinking about the Victor® mouse traps, their logo and whether or not I wanted to blog about it. At the time I decided that, as a rodent-lover, I would not go there.
Soon afterwards our good friend and neighbor, Jacqueline had a sudden infestation of mice. This was due to some packages of bird seed and cat food that were stored in the basement, but were not mouse-proof. (Bad animals taking food from the mouths of good animals?) She went to Home Depot and purchased the entire Victor mouse trap product line—doubtless the very same mouse traps whose aesthetic properties I had been ruminating over. It was the coincidence of Jacqueline’s use of Victor mouse traps that has led me to write about this, after all.
(A shocking photo and more to read after the jump...)
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