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Camouflage Package Design Continued

Lest anyone imagine that camouflage patterns were confined only to beverage packaging, here are some recent examples of camouflage package design, in general.

Because of its star logo, Amour Star seems ready-made for a patriotic camouflage treatment, although it’s debatable how American a “Vienna Sausage” can ever be. (Designed by Bob Oliva)

Jiffy Pop, too, has undergone camouflage treatment. (Via: Lester Of Puppets’s Flickr Photostream)

“Powderflage” powder concealer comes in a camouflage canister. (Note how its camo pattern is made of butterflies.)

Srixon’s camouflaged USO golf balls pack, we’ve mentioned before.

Yoder’s canned bacon comes in a camouflage patterned can.

“A Bathing Ape” (aka: BAPE) has for a while featured camouflage patterns in its branding.

And Huggie’s diapers have also supported our troops through camouflage patterning.

Also: camouflage candy...

and camouflage peanuts, for some reason.

(and one more example, after the fold...)

Clown Cereal

Clown cereal boxes (Kellogg’s, General Mills & Post) were, I think, all from Dan Goodsell’s Flickr Photostream

My early childhood was spent in Sarasota, Florida, home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

While clowns have been culturally waning for some time now, in those days, there was a show called “Circus Boy” on television (starring a young Micky Dolenz who grew up to become the Monkee‘s drummer) and there were lots of circus-themed packages at the grocery store. Not yet scary, clowns were still considered a good way to market children’s cereals.

Why the sudden interest in clowns, you ask?

(Asked and answered, after the fold...)

Dan Witz: Bar Shrine Paintings

“Shrine” (I’ve also seen this painting titled as “Bar”) 2006, 68x40 oil and mixed media on canvas

Dan Witz (mentioned in yesterday’s post) was one of several roommates that I shared a low-ceilinged, South Street Seaport loft with in the late 1970s.

I like his paintings of liquor bottles. The one above from 2006 seems to have two different titles: “Bar” and “Shrine.” His later liquor bottle paintings from 2010 seem to have combined these two titles into “Bar Shrine.”

I can find nothing online to suggest that it’s intentional, but the painting above looks like a skull to me. A subliminal vanitas symbol for a splendid array of liquor choices? (Death-as-bartender: “Name your poison!”)

Bar Shrine #2 Triptych, 2010, 56" x 84" oil and digital media on canvas

(One more “Bar Shrine” painting, after the fold...)

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...)

Nozzle Necklaces

Upper left: Sterling silver “Spray Can Nozzle” pendant from Solitary Man ($255); upper right: Nozzle Necklace w/ Krylon logo cut out of a can by Jaymeer, 1997 (see also: Silver Nozzle); lower left:  Hand-made clogged nozzle necklace by Steven Jacobs ($15); lower right: Sterling silver “Tag’n Run” necklaces—with and without diamond from Red Sofa ($65)

Some packaging jewelry of a very specific type: necklaces made from spray paint can nozzles.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Spray Paint Can Concepts

Part of the Canceptual V.4 show at Crewest was devoted to Man One’s collaboration with Berlin Packaging’s Studio One Eleven, “Paint the Future” envisioning alternate spray paint cans:

“One of our strengths lies in understanding and implementing experiential design — that is, how people actually use and interact with a package. Man One Design asked us to apply that expertise to provide a vision for paint delivery systems that suit the needs of street artists,” said Scott Jost, Berlin Packaging Vice President of Innovation and Design. “These ideas open a dialogue that can help pave the way for equipping graffiti artists with better tools.”

“Street art is becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for brands to connect with younger consumers, but artists are limited by the capabilities of the conventional spray can. We asked Studio One Eleven to take an exploratory journey with us to think differently about the spray can and suggest ways to improve can performance,” said Scott Power, Managing Principal, Man One Design. “Our goal with the ‘Paint the Future’ showcase is to inspire and facilitate packaging innovation by asking a professional artist and heavy utilizer of spray paint like Man One what he wants and needs from a spray can to create his artwork. This is a path to discover new and meaningful value that translates into strategic opportunities for paint manufacturers.”

Berlin Packaging

Graffiti as “strategic opportunity” despite hardware stores keeping cans of spray paint in locked cabinets to discourage tagging.

Note concepts above for: accordion cartridge feature, a rocket shaped can and duplex spray can.

(More photos, after the fold...)

Canceptual

On left: “Knuck Can” by Waxer; on right: “Spray Bomb” by Brian Lynk

Canceptual v.4 is an art show of spray paint cans at Crewest in Los Angeles that ends tomorrow.

(See also: You Can Go Your Own Way and Can-Gun)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

2 Lemon Spray Cans

Two lemon-scented air freshener spray cans:

1. Conceptual package design for “True” air fresheners (by Berik Yergaliyev at Good!) relies on a soft rubber spray can cap enabling the user to spray the product as if by squeezing the fruit. (See: Packaging & Plastic Fruit)

Lemon is just one of three proposed scents. (Somehow the ice cream cone seems like the outlier in this envisioned product line... See: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.)

2. Kuumba’s “Clot” brand lemon tea air freshener spray comes in a spray-paint-style can whose graphics reference Krylon spray paint’s overlapping colored circles/balls. (Although real lemons mainly come in yellow.) Here, the colored circle/balls are given fruit skin texture highlights and lemon leaves.

The “Clot” brand, I suppose, alludes to clogging of spray paint nozzles, but it also reminds me of “lemon curd” for some reason.

(via: Ape to Man)

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

Uncapped Landfill Jar #4

Musterole: Before & After. Not the usual “before & after” package redesign photos. The photo on left (by Rick Schies) and my photo (on the right) shows what the small white jar looked like “before”—migrating from its uncapped landfill to Dead Horse Bay Beach—and “after.”

Early advertising below shows that this jar originally came in a box.

Another Musterole ad from 1913 touted the clean whiteness of the jar:

“You get this clean, white ointment out of a clean, white jar. You simply rub it on—and the pain is gone!”

Smearing Mustard on the Skin, by Roger M. Grace
2005, Metroplitan News Company

(One more early Musterole ad, after the fold...)

Vincent Pacheco’s Cigarette Pack Paintings

Portraits of cigarette packs by artist & graphic-designer, Vincent Pacheco.
(via: MKTG)

(A few more package-related paintings by Pacheco, after the fold...)

Auction House Packaging

 

A long time ago I worked in the advertising department of Christie’s auction house, where it fell to us to design their magazine ads and catalog covers, etc.  There was also a photo department where they took photographs of the consigned artworks.

As we near the end of our double week of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—(scraping the bottom of the bowl?)—we are again resorting to Pop Art. These two photographs, each showing an arrangement of Warhol’s shipping cartons (including the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes type) are from the two major competing auction houses: Christie’s above and Sotheby’s, on right.

Neither of these packaging arrangements are the type you would see at the supermarket. In a retail setting (of course) the stacked display would be retail packages, rather than shipping cartons and they would most likely be all the same brand. Maybe you would see this sort of thing in some unusually haphazard grocery store stockroom? I don’t know. I never worked in a grocery.

What the two photos do show is the variability of permissible arrangements that these sculptures may be placed in. These two competitors are each offering nearly identical collections—although the Sotheby’s collection does contain an added Del Monte carton—but their “product photos” are very different.

Christie’s, here went in for the sort of “casually flung” arrangement suggesting a communing between the different brands. like a arrangement of furniture to help facilitate conversation.

Sotheby’s arrangement is the more daring, I think. Their boxes are displayed at alternating angles in a single stack—a pop art version of Brâncuşi’s endless column.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

UPC as Package Proxy

While I’m not that into all of Bernard Solco’s creative output (His “pop” portraits of celebrities seem to skew Republican.) I do like these UPC prints from his “Symbology” series.

Does the barcode on the wall, serve as a proxy for a decoratively-problematic corn flakes package? Pop Art for people with Minimalist sensibilities?

Although Solco does go to considerable effort to put his work in a Pop Art context:

All editions are printed by the artist and Alexander Heinrici in his studio in NYC. Heinrici is a “Master Printer” whose expertise was also utilized by Andy Warhol for the Campbell’s soup can series...

Top left: Welch’s Grape Jelly Print; on right: Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Print; lower left: Fedex Code Print; on right: Kodak Film Print

It’s easy to imagine how Solco’s blending of abstraction and brand-specificity might appeal to corporate art collections...

“Bernard Solco has painted more than 60 UPC Barcode Paintings for private and corporate collectors such as Kodak, America Online, and Tim Smucker.”

...but the general public has also embraced this sort of thing—barcodes, and other opaque symbols, as fashion and decor. (See: Consumed Column, Style Decoder)

Why is this? These codes may contain all sorts of data, but the information is not readily accessible to the naked eye. Yes, barcodes & QR codes can be scanned and decoded with the right smart phone app, but that doesn’t explain their popularity as decorative patterns.

I think it’s precisely because we can’t just read their information that they are popular. Unlike a television commercial whose commercial message you involuntarily absorb, encoded information you don’t have to receive unless (for some reason) you want to.

Until decoded, these are just abstract patterns and you get to remain blissfully ignorant of any content they might contain. (Unless its meaning is explicitly spelled out, as it is in Solco’s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes UPC)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Georgina Luck’s Spattered Packagings

And on the subject of messy packaging ... Lately, I‘ve been seeing Georgina Luck’s illustrations of food packaging appearing on other package-related blogs and I’m happy to join the pack.

I like the explosive Ralph Steadman style spatter she employs—(example of Steadman’s style)—but seeing it applied to pictures of packaging, the effect is different.

Each of her packages appears to have been rendered with a singular splat onto the page. While “linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown” may ultimately lead back to Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism—in this context, with this subject matter, it looks as if the contents in each container could not be contained. Not that this failure of containers to actually contain is necessarily a bad thing. Here, as with the spatters & drips on packaging mentioned yesterday, the messiness of the package seems to signal succulent contents.

Also cool that she chose to feature the Royal Baking Powder can—the clearest and most direct example of a Droste effect package that I know of.

(Another photo from Georgina Luck’s blog, after the fold...)

Paul McCarthy’s Ketchup Brand(s)

When I first saw the photo of “Daddies Tomato Ketchup” on left, I thought it must be fictitious product, invented by artist, Paul McCarthy. It turns out to be a real brand, apparently owned by Heinz. (Heinz ketchup is another brand sometimes used as a medium in McCarthy’s artwork.)

Photo on right is a detail from “Ketchup Sandwich” an installation in which layers of Heinz ketchup are spread between layers of glass. (Photo from minimapedalia’s Flickr Photostream)

Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy’s main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them.

(from Wikipedia’s entry on Paul McCarthy)

In McCarthy’s oeuvre, there is particular emphasis on the mess made by ketchup. And although he uses various foods as a proxy for bodily fluids he says, “there is a big difference between ketchup and blood.”

Below is McCarthy’s Daddies Tomato Ketchup Inflatable, 2007

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

More Drips

More drip/droplet packaging. Following up on an earlier post about this trend, I’m seeing more examples...

1. Magic marker brand, Krink is doing the Absolut Vodka thing, on left—thereby making the connection between packaging drips and graffiti absolutely explicit. (via: PopSop)

2. The single golden drip featured on Moruba’s label design for Karey Olive Oil (center) is more an illustration of package contents and about as far from expressionistic graffiti style as you can get. Have to admire the astute typographic insight that enabled the designer to see the discreet teardrop that was always latent in that sideways “y.” (via: the dieline)

3. Mystery packs: I don’t know where I found the blue-yellow-red bath set bottles, on right. I have lost track of my source. (If anyone knows, please tell me; I don’t like making them anonymous.) The dripping paper collar loops that cover the caps and tuck-in are interesting. The connotations here (for dripping primary colors) seem to be more painterly—less “street art.”

(A video of the Krink/Absolut bottle, after the fold...)

Joshua Casey’s Empty Package Paintings

Paintings of empty packages by Josh Casey...

This new collection of paintings is an extension my own background in package design and product illustration. It also pays tribute to my interest in antiquated objects and the empty vessels of mass consumption. These everyday objects were intended to be used and discarded but have miraculously survived and traveled through time like an ark, carrying nothing but bearing the patina and wear of its human contact and documenting the eroding landscape of the 20th century.

–Josh Casey

(A couple more of his paintings, after the fold...)

Tom Pfannerstill’s Trompe-l’oeil Packaging

Pfannerstill retrieves “trash” from the street and takes it into the studio where...  He carefully and faithfully reproduces the object in wood and paint...

from Cumberland Gallery announcement:
‘Talking Trash’ With Tom Pfannerstill

In this context, when you see the word, “trash” — read: “packaging”.

(via: the MKTG Tumbler site)

(See also: Packaging Walk and Sergeech)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Pamela Michelle Johnson:Vanitas & Fast Moving Consumer Goods

PB&J / 30"x36" / oil on canvas / 2010

It’s been Wonder Bread week here on boxvox. (In case you were wondering...) Since last Friday.

To close out the thread and (hopefully) lead us on to other topics, I’m starting off with the painting above from the “Series II” still-life paintings of Pamela Michelle Johnson. (via: the MKTG Tumbler site) Note: the rumpled Wonder bread bag...

Two things strike me about this body of work:

Thing 1: They suggest the traditional conflicts of abundance & decay found in vanitas still-lifes ...

Vanitas paintings gather up objects that indicate abundance and decay, luxury and waste, to remind you that nothing lasts forever, particularly yourself. Some exude austerity, thumping the death note pretty hard; others luxuriate in a pile-up of earthly bric-a-brac. The word itself, vanitas, means “emptiness” in Latin, and at their most moralistic, the paintings try to spark an awareness of the deficiencies of the material world, urging you to lead a good temperate life and better prepare yourself for what comes after.

The conceit gains its force through a combination of extremes (items simultaneously flourishing and decomposing), the expression of appetite (through food and place setting)... and the suggestion of human presence (the meal that looks as if it were suddenly abandoned).

Death, Abundance, and Table Settings
March 1st, 2010 by Peter B. Hyland

EGGO /  32"x40" / oil on canvas / 2010

Thing 2: By showing these packaged foods towards the very end of their useful life, Johnson highlights the “negative moment” that Thomas Hine talks about in his book, The Total Package:

“... once the product has been used up, and the package is empty, it becomes suddenly visible once more. This time, though, it is trash that must be discarded or recycled. This instant of disposal is the time when people are most aware of packages. It is a negative moment, like the end of a love affair, and what’s left seems to be a horrid waste.”

Zeroing in on specific consumer brands in relative isolation—(rather than showing cornucopias of variety and abundance)—Johnson portrays packaging and contents in use. The packaging in particular appears to have been thoroughly used. Bottles & jars are mostly empty. Boxes are already halfway crushed—(well in advance of the trash compactor).

Certainly not advertising imagery, but still appetising in sad sort of way. Where early vanitas painting reminded 16th and 17th century viewers of their own inevitable death, these paintings present the brief, but profitable lifespan of fast moving consumer goods. And as consumers who strongly identify with what they consume, this works on us in pretty much the same way—reminding each us of our own expiration date. 

(More paintings by Pamela Michelle Johnson, after the fold...)

Rat Fink Packaging

On left: packaging for Ed Roth licensed products from House Industries; on right: Rat Fink in a can of 1 Shot paint from Jalopy Journal

I was terrible at building models as a kid and was always a little disappointed that the plastic parts weren’t already colored since I couldn’t hope to paint them as nicely as the picture on the box. Still, when I was a kid in the sixties I remember asking for and receiving a Revelle Rat Fink model. I think it was one of the hot rod series, although I was really mainly into the rat...

Anyway, it seems I was in good company seeing as how House Industries co-founder, Andy Cruz was also into R.F.

“...Around this time, Cruz’s obsession with the Southern California hot-rod culture epitomized by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the car builder and illustrator famed for his grotesque Rat Fink caricatures, and was spending all his extra money on Rat Fink models, iron-ons, decals and other ephemera. “It hit me one day,” he says. “Why not have my hobby work for me?” In 1996, Cruz’s revelation led to a licensed collaboration with Roth that yielded his Rat Fink font, a translation of Roth’s hand-lettered type into the digital realm.”

–Jesse Ashlock, AIGA

I’ve gotten plenty of use out of those Rat Fink fonts, but it’s interesting to learn the back story behind their getting into this area in such big way.

The most important part of inspiration is being true to one’s sources, so we jumped at the opportunity to work with hot rodding legend Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Ed was a pop artist, accomplished letterer and a consummate self-promoter, which are all cues we took when conceptualizing our first foray into licensing. By combining our maniacal penchant for authenticity and our appreciation for Ed’s impact on the masses, we reintroduced his genius with eight fonts, 32 pieces of artwork and an authentic Revell-style model box.

“Rat Fink” House Industries

(Note: the can of 1 Shot paint in Rat Fink’s hand above)

(More of their pinstriping T-Shirt cans, after the fold...)