box vox

Super PAC Packaging

As we enjoy a new, hyperbolic political season, generously funded by large amounts of Super Political Action Committee money, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at some earlier types of Super Pac.

Not surprisingly, the name was previously associated with packaging.

SuperPac, Inc., whose logo appears at top, offers “A Tradition of Excellence in Flexographic Printing.”

SuperPAC™ (logo: above center) is a trademark of Thomasville Furniture:

Thomasville’s promise to provide our customers with the best overall kitchen, bath, and other room solutions initiated our development of SuperPAC, our patent pending packaging technique.

And SuperPac is also the name of a British company that makes a car stereo accessory. (Logo by Frankman Design)

Superpac is the new way to hold your detachable car stereo front. Designed to replace the dull black plastic case supplied with most car stereos, the Superpac offers you a stylish way to protect your cherished face-off style car stereo.

Mastey de Paris carries a SuperPac “Intensive Reconstructor Conditioner for Stressed, Damaged Hair” (above, right)

Superpac reconstructs damaged hair, rebuilding and reinforcing the hair’s protein chains. Superpac enables hair to retain its elasticity and structural integrity with newfound bounce and resilience.

Mastey de Paris

There was also a Timberland Super Pac boot. (via: Gwar Izm)

Nowadays, a candidate whose political campaign benefits from Super PAC money is not supposed to “coordinate directly” with his or her Super PAC benefactor. In practice, however, a candidate’s Super PAC is often run by a close ally—a Super PAC man.  (e.g., Jon Stewart is Steven Colbert’s “Super PAC man”)

Not to be confused with an earlier “Super Pac-Man.”

Top & center: Commodore 64 “Super Pac-Man” packaging from Moby Games; bottom photo: a General Mills Pac-Man cereal with “Super Pac-Man Marshmallows” from Jason Liebig’s flickr Photostream

Now, if we were willing to be more liberal about the spelling of the term—accepting say “PAK” as a reasonable variant (as in Political Action Kommittee?)—then there’s even more to think about.

(More, after the fold...)

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...)

Food Stamp Beer Photos

While looking for Ballantine XXX Ale bottles for a post last month, I found the illicit-looking photo in the upper right corner.

From a series of photographs by Brayden Olson for Vice Magazine. I like the paparazzi flash and intestinal-pink^* backgrounds of these photos, but I have some misgivings about the article it illustrates. Apparently it’s possible at certain bodegas in NYC to get around the regulations prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages.

“... since receipts at most bodegas in Brooklyn aren’t itemized and products in the store are never scanned (most likely because they are thieves), there is no way to tell what you actually bought.”

“Food Stamp Beer Reviews” Vice

I cringe to think of this article being used to punch more holes in the already tenuous social safety net. With unemployment so high, the demographic of food stamp recipients has clearly changed.

Food policy experts and human resource administrators are quick to point out that the overwhelming majority of the record 38 million Americans now using food stamps are their traditional recipients: the working poor, the elderly and single parents on welfare.

But they also note that recent changes made to the program as part of last year’s stimulus package, which relaxed the restrictions on able-bodied adults without dependents to collect food stamps, have made some young singles around the country eligible for the first time.

Hipsters on food stamps, by Jennifer Bleyer
Salon, March 15, 2010

If “unemployment” can somehow still be viewed as a character defect in the minds of those who have recently characterized the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “unemployed, uneducated and uninformed” — this bodega beer thing may eventually wind up on Fox News as a way of discrediting these new, younger food stamp recipients and food assistance programs in general.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

A footnoted digression: *The color “intensinal pink” is not my own invention. My father coined this term to describe the color of my grandmother’s house on Long Island.

Pageviews as Burgers: a package design blog McMilestone

Not that I’m all breathlessly over the moon about this, but I noticed a couple of months ago that box vox’s pageviews had exceeded the 1 million mark. Never mind that it’s taken three years for this to happen. If pageviews were burgers I’d be supersized. If page views were dollars I’d be rich. (But not super-rich.)

It took Andrew Gibbs and the dieline only a year to hit the same milestone, but in the competion for pageviews among package design blogs, I’m embracing the philosophy espoused in The Belle Brigade’s #1 hit song, Losers.

One package designer’s repudiation of American exceptionalism? (Or just sour grapes?)

(Official “Losers” video, after the fold...)

Uncapped Landfill Bottle #6

Two matching bottles: one chipped—one melted. More de-branded glass bottles from Dead Horse Bay, but in this case we have a patent number (110034) embossed on the bottom...

A bottle designed by Edwin T. Reynolds. No mention of what the bottle was meant to contain, but the patent was assigned to “Lorr Laboratories” of Patterson, NJ.

A search for any additional patents assigned to “Lorr Laboratories” turns up this odd “container cap”—also designed by Edwin T. Reynolds. Again, no mention of the product...

Could this be the cap the went with these bottles? It was patented around the same time. What did Lorr Laboratories manufacture?

“We manufacture a polish called Dura-Gloss and only produce it to be sold in all stores for 10 cents. Our business is to furnish that, and we also furnish some brands of miscellaneous drugs.”

–from Lorr Laboratories’ testimony before on “H.R. 8367”—a bill to amend the Tariff Act of 1930 by reclassifying brushes or hair pencils for manicuring purposes. April 18, 1940

Nail polish. That art deco bottle cap design was meant to represent a fingernail! Logical to show the nail polish color on the cap, and a good way to demonstrate its effect as a fingernail color. But, for some reason, lethally sharp and claw-like in its execution.

(Dura-Gloss trademark, bottle label, additional advertising images, and competition with Cutex, after the fold...)

Plain Cigarette Packaging

Expanding on Australia’s “plain cigarette packaging” initiative (under which all cigarette packaging would be made generic), Jennifer Noon & Sarah Shaw have envision anti-ergonomic, trapezoidal packs:

“Our primary aim was to change the structure of the pack making it less ergonomic. The pack was developed to be difficult to use and carry, it is hard to fit into pockets due to its triangular shape and the angled inner means the cigarettes are hard to get out. The lid is designed so that it closes efficiently but after a few uses it becomes weak, meaning the cigarettes can fall out if being stored in a ladies handbag.

We decided to use an off putting colour on the outer of the pack choosing a yellow green which was identified to have negative connotations. We then added a mould texture to really emphasise the disgusting feel of the pack and reduce the glamour appeal for young people.”

The idea of deliberately engineering a “weak” lid is interesting... like planned obsolescence, but for a good cause.

Note: the alternating right-side-up / up-side-down close-packing arrangement...

...and a rare example of “open mouth” packs that feature human mouths, rather than cute animal mouths.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Atom Bomb Bottles: 2 Kinds

On left: vintage “Atom Bomb” perfume by Jergens (via: iOffer “wanted” ad); on right melted bottles on exhibit at the Hiroshima Peace Museum (photo from: alq666’s Flickr Photostream) 

Yesterday’s post about bomb-shaped bottles leads us inexorably to “atom bomb bottles.”

1. “Atom Bomb” perfume, trademarked by Jergens in 1948, came in a rocket-shaped bottle. (Its bottle cap looks a bit like a Devo hat)

2. Bottles that have been melted by atom bombs, on permanent display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum.

On left: melted bottle on exhibit at the Hiroshima Peace Museum (photo from: Fidel Ramos’s Flickr Photostream); on right: “Atom Bomb” perfume bottle (for sale on eBay for $24.99)

(Jergens “Atom Bomb” trademark and more melted bottles, after the fold...)

Patent Medicine as Political Metaphor

Not an insulin bottle: H. H. Warners “Safe” Diabetes Cure (photos from Warner’s Safe Cure Blog)

In Friday’s post (about Charles Antell’s Formula No. 9) I took an off-topic political swipe at “today’s neo-Reagan Republicans.

Formula No. 9’s truth-in-advertising problem (there were claims made about curing hair loss) goes back to patent medicine and the laws, enacted to prevent fraudulent product claims. Not that these laws completely ended deceptive marketing. Nowadays, instead of saying “A sure remedy for diabetes” a company today might say something like, “Emerging science suggests...”

What prompted my parenthetical politics on Friday, was the apparent unanimity among current Republicans hopefuls that any governmental intervention in business affairs is bad for business, bad for jobs, un-American etc. Following the GOP’s current economic tenents to their logical conclusion, we would need to repeal the Pure Food and Drug Act and embrace the sale of rancid meat and patent medicines. Surely even die-hard conservatives would have to agree that those governmental regulations (brought about by Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt) were a good thing... right?

Wrong. By today’s political calculous Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican in name only. Maybe there’s some revisionist history at work here, in which we would all have been better off if patent medicines had never been regulated. Glenn Beck seems to swing that way.

But in the broader cultural sense, both political parties seem to understand that patent medicine was a harmful fraud, because both sides use it as a metaphor to criticize each other.

Roosevelt, himself, used it when he complained in 1898 about how McKinley’s campaign manager, “advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine.”

More recently the metaphor has coalesced around the economy...

Political illusions—the blue smoke and mirrors that have accompanied Reaganomics, for instance—are maintained only by hope. It’s the same sort of hope that benefits salesmen of snake oil and patent medicine; people ache so badly for relief that they suspend cynicism and mistrust.

An Honest Man, 1981, The Harvard Crimson

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“The low-growth years of the past two decades have produced an intense, fascinating debate between economists of rival ideologies. Sadly, they have also produced the policy entrepreneur—the economic snake-oil salesman who offers easy anwers to hard problems.”

“The fault line between serious economic thinking and economic patent medicine, between the professors and the policy entrepreneurs, is at least as important as the divide between left and right.”

Paul Krugman, 1994
Peddling Prosperity:
Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations

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The Great Tax Cut Delusion and its false promise of a free lunch for the American people must be cast aside as a patent medicine dangerous for the nation’s health. If not, we risk speeding rapidly toward a second tier economy and a vanishing middle class.

Walter Williams and Bryan D. Jones, 2008, SeattlePi
False promise of free lunch
Bush policies put U.S. on road to second-tier economy and vanishing middle class

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Unfortunately for America, we bought “Mr. O’s Special Blend of Snake Oil Hope & Changery,” and now we’re broke and worse off than we were before.

Obama the Snake Oil Salesman
The Conservative Brawler, 2009

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Thank you for acknowledging that Republican medicine has earned a Patent. While the drug that Democrats are pushing is experimental. Still not ready for use on rats, but Democrats are taking a short cut. Injecting it directly into humans. Risky at best. Deadly?

A pro-Republican comment about Jay Bookman’s anti-republican blog post in 2009: GOP still peddling its patent medicine

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Last night, watching President Barack Hussein Obama’s press conference, I felt thrust back in time to the con men of the medicine shows. Obama is more polished than the quacks of old, but he’s just another snake oil salesman.

The Great Obama Traveling Patent Medicine Show
Robert J. Avrech, 2009

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The latest term of political art is an old-fashioned insult: Snake oil.

President Obama used the phrase twice yesterday to describe Republican economic policies, saying the GOP would wreck the economy (again) if it re-takes control of Congress.

The Republicans "are clinging to the same worn-out, tired, snake oil ideas that they were peddling before," Obama said in Los Angeles...

Of course, the definition of snake oil is in the eye of the political peddler.

Republicans say the term applies to Obama policies — the stimulus bill, health care, new business regulations — that they say have failed.

Obama, Republicans offer different definitions of ‘snake oil’
USA Today, 2010

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The GOP’s prescription for our economic woes is like one of those old bottles of patent medicine you see in museums — dusty, completely ineffective, peddled by hucksters, and probably containing something that will make you even sicker. Nevertheless, this morning’s very dismal jobs report has the GOP reaching for some of that old-time medicine yet again.

The GOP’s Bad Medicine, 2011, ThinkProgress.org

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Here at home, the GOP is pushing austerity politics like patent medicine, but far too many Democrats — including the White House — are also buying in...

Bruce Schmiechen, 2011
The Austerity Agenda: Governments creating even greater disaster

(Some political cartoons, after the fold...)

Containing a Product / Supporting the Troops

We recently needed a can of WD-40 and the one we bought turned out to be one of their limited edition series of collectible cans to honor American military forces. It made me wonder about this kind of “Support Our Troops” packaging.

There were lots of companies during World War II that made “supporting the war effort” a key element of their advertising. (See: Life Savers at War) Today, I expect, few of our transnational, global corporations would want to be closely associated with any one side of a conflict. Not when there’s so little political consensus and even terrorists are potential customers.

As a marketing strategy, “Supporting the Troops” is similar to other ethical marketing causes. A portion of the proceeds of each purchase are supposed to benefit the troops.

Necco’s “Red White & You” Sweethearts candy, the benefit is delivered via the USO:

As part of the program, New England Confectionery Company donated  Sweethearts for every Operation USO Care Package sent from June through August. Candies were printed with heartfelt sayings like “Miss You,” “Brave One” and “Home Safe.”

Schneider Associates

Srixon Golf Balls also “teamed up” with the USO:

Srixon, a world leader in golf club and golf ball technology, is proud to announce that in support of our troops overseas and the sacrifices they and their families have made in service to our country, Srixon has teamed up with the United Service Organization (USO) to give back to our troops.  From July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2011, we will be donating 5% of net proceeds from the sale of Srixon camouflaged packaged golf products and accessories or those featuring the USO logo, to the USO.

Srixon Blog

WD-40’s troop support proceeds go to three different charities:

Crown Aerosol Packaging North America, a business unit of Crown Holdings Inc. and WD-40 Company are launching a limited edition series of collectible cans to honor American military forces. The series consists of four different designs: three depicting air, sea, and land themes and one combined graphic showcasing all five military branches, including the Coast Guard.

WD-40 Company will donate 10 cents per can purchased to three military charities: Armed Services YMCA, Wounded Warrior Project and Veterans Medical Research Foundation. Crown will also make a donation to each of the charities.

Package Design Magazine

Sometimes, even with the most charitable intentions, a package design can be disturbing.

(Packaging that attempts to honor “the fallen”, after the fold...)

Mine Enemy’s Candy

Mussolini, Hitler & Hirohito candy boxes, each with an open die-cut mouth (via: Hakes)

I don’t know what it is about candy and war. We’ve had a couple of other posts touching on it... the German Chocolate Hand Grenade... the Candy Bomber...

These candy boxes above, from WWII, feature Axis leaders with die cut mouths, ostensibly a game for children to throw balls into—(the French text on the boxes offers encouragements like “Hitler’s Speech Is Finished” and “A Sharp Movement, It Should Shut Him Up.”)—but I wonder if children didn’t also dispense candy from those mouths.

Which brings us to the War on Terror and Osama bin Laden. While bin Laden has certainly been featured in a number of insulting products here in the United States, children’s candy does not seem to be among them.

Which is not to say that our recently deceased enemy combatant has never appeared on a box of kid’s candy. Consider: Super Osama bin Laden Kulfa Balls.

Photo from: Fullsteam’s Flickr Photostream

Not anti bin Laden candy since it was most popular in Afghanistan and Pakistan and uses that brush script adjective “Super” on the packaging.

In the war on terrorism, this was clearly the enemy’s candy—not meant for consumption in the United States, although, for some reason, available in China.

Manufactured in Pakistan, this product apparently dates back to 2002:

Many vestiges of the Taliban era remain untouched in the beat-up, dusty center of Kandahar, where the ruins of buildings that collapsed during the recent American bombing campaign lie among the ruins of older battles. Venders with carts sell “Super Osama bin Laden Kulfa Balls”—coconut candy manufactured in Pakistan and packaged in pink-and-purple boxes covered with images of bin Laden surrounded by tanks, cruise missiles, and jet fighters.

After the Revolution, by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker, January 28, 2002

Aside from Super Osama bin Laden Kulfa Balls, I know of one other bin Laden candy: Peta’s “Bin Laden Bites” vegan chocolate bars, released in April of last year.

(Photos of Bin Laden Bites packaging, after the fold...)

Stealing Box Tops

(Photo via: Trash Society)

Back in the heyday of “box tops” promotions, kids were encouraged by cereal companies to pressure their moms into regularly purchasing a particular brand — not because a cereal was necessarily their favorite, but in order to collect enough redeemable box-top-coupons to exchange for some wonderful prize.

I have no doubt that there were desperate and unscrupulous children in those days who occasionally resorted to theft of box tops in order to get those prizes.

Today, “box tops” promotions offer a very different incentive for collecting, but a recent TV News item reveals that theft of box tops is still very much a possibility.

As one of the many institutions currently threatened with drastic budget cuts, public schools are being forced to rely more and more on “the private sector” to try and make up the shortfall.

General Mills characterizes their program as a way to help “fill gaps in school budgets.” Although, it’s also clearly part of the whole “cause marketing” trend, in which your consumer purchase is meant to serve as proxy for a good deed. (The good deed in this case: a contribution to your local school budget.)

But is this type of alternative school funding an example of pragmatic American ingenuity? Or is it evidence of how we unwittingly capitulate in the broader effort to privatize public education?

Are we robbing Peter (school budgets) to pay Paul (General Mills)?

PRO:

Box Toppers are a community of passionate people, joined together to help create change in our schools. Join us, and you’ll get exclusive benefits that include ways to stay connected with other parents on topics that matter to you as well as tools and promotions to recruit others to the cause.

BoxTop4Education.com

CON:

Incentive programs like General Mills’ Box Tops for Education, Pizza Hut’s Book It!, and Campbell’s Soups’ Labels for Education encourage school fund raisers to influence family purchases of specific brands or to frequent certain businesses. In-school fundraisers using items like magazines or candy turn kids into salespeople. Company sponsors gain an unpaid sales force and can inflate prices since the enterprise appears charitable. Increasingly, schools are engaging in the absurd practice of encouraging purchases from certain websites like schoolpop.com, robbing their community businesses and their own sales tax base—a key part of school funding in many districts!

ReclaimDemocracy.org

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Product Placement at Bin Laden’s Compound

The television set that I mostly watched in 2001, was one with an antenna (rather than a cable) that we had in our kitchen. After September 11, the only network our kitchen TV could pick up was ABC. (Apparently the competing stations relied on transmitters atop one of the twin towers.)

It was during that time that I got into the habit of watching ABC news.

This week, when I first saw the helmet-cam video of Bin Laden’s bedroom, it struck me that there were shots of packaging and clutter that constituted a problematic sort of product placement for manufacturers. Would Vaseline really want its customers to know they were using the same brand of petroleum jelly as Osama Bin Laden?

Unfortunately, I seem to have been scooped by Diane Sawyer and Nick Schifrin. Last night ABC took us on a frame-by-frame packaging reconnaissance through the video, in a piece entitled, “Osama Bin Laden Dead: Osama’s Medicine Cabinet.”

This report even included 3D packages (identified by product type, rather than brand name) against a hi-tech grid with cross-hair sights. Similar to the graphics that Sarah Palin was criticized for, only here the targets are packages, rather than political opponents. In Bin Laden’s compound, of course, the shooting had already occurred and packages were not the target. (Although shooting at packaging is a traditional form of target practice.)

(See also: Product Placement at Gitmo and Packaging and Moral Turpitude)

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

Frack Pack

Saw Gasland on TV a while back, so I knew about “fracking” and how it had seriously contaminated drinking water here in the United States, but I didn’t know that Canada was thinking of competing with us in the area of flammable drinking water!

Goût de schiste (“Good Taste of Quebec Shale”) is Valérie L’italien’s concept for the commercialization of this particular type of firewater. (d’eau flambé?)

Turning the perceived flaw of flammability into a product feature, she brings us: packaged (flammable) water.

Done as a project for Sylvain Allard’s packaging class at UQAM, Professor Allard has this to say about the new beverage:

... after having promised the moon to oil and gas companies, our good government finds itself in trouble because of the negative reaction of Quebecers who fear the environmental consequences of shale gas. In fact, dramatic stories have been reported in some American states where groundwater got contaminated with the shale gas. Pictures of taps that ignite were shown in the media...

Never mind, we must move forward announced Minister Nathalie Normandeau hammering that shale gas must create wealth. She never explains how this wealth will eventually come back to us though. In fact, like all our natural resources, profits seem more a vision of the mind than a reality. But Nathalie seems convinced that people just don’t get it and that against all odds, her government has the mandate to go forward.

In my packaging class, we believe we have the real solution to increase the collective wealth. Because shale gas is likely to contaminate our groundwater, why resist the temptation to exploit the bonanza? Indeed, what may seem like a catastrophe could become a true treasure. I named the shale gas carbonated water developed by my student Valerie Italian. After Perrier and Sanpellegrino, we would have the Good Taste of Quebec Shale. This particular carbonated water would be available in several flavors and come with a match to burn the excess gas...

via: Packaging UQAM (Read the full story: here)

(See also: Toxic Trail Mix and Elizabeth Royte on Packaged Water)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Campbell’s Thankgiving

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]

2007 Julia Auctions

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...)

Shelf Reliance

Following up on yesterday’s train of thought about 1960s fallout shelters and their stockpiles of canned goods—(it’s “end-of-the-world week”, here on boxvox)—we find that President Kennedy’s impulse to privatize civil defense has apparently evolved over the years into what we now call the “survivalist” (or “preparedness”) movement. There are a number of businesses catering to this constituency. Shelf Reliance is one of them:

SHELF RELIANCE is a company that specializes in food storage, storage rotation, and emergency preparedness products. Our goal is to help families prepare for whatever tomorrow may bring, allowing them to feel confident if disaster strikes.

(from the About Us section of their web site)

Where some survivalist food packaging emulates a generic, civil defense look, Shelf Reliance’s “Thrive” brand is light and airy and uses a pastel color-code to differentiate between food groups. Their products are even carried by Costco.

Food rotation, the concept introduced by Better Homes & Garden in the late 1950s, seems to now be an established practice for many Americans. (I hadn‘t realized that.) What is it that Shelf Reliance’s customers should be preparing for? According to their web site:

• Natural Disaster
• Terrorism
• Labor Strike
• Economic Depression
• Drought
• Crop Failure
• Personal Tragedy
• Civil Unrest
• Unemployment

One big change from the 1960s—nuclear fallout is not mentioned.

(Some food rotation products and survivalist videos, after the fold

Fallout Shelter Packaging

Today we look at packaged food in family fallout shelters.

In the 1960s, rather than promising “a chicken in every pot” president Kennedy called for “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.”

In his book, Populuxe—(in the chapter entitled “Just Push The Button”)—Thomas Hine makes an interesting point about Kennedy’s proposal for building home fallout shelters: that it would privatize civil defense.

Kennedy’s program... would have transformed civil defense from a community-based responsibility to one that was carried out by individual suburban families. Air-raid shelters were hardly a new thing, but previously they had been group facilities which mobilized the solidarity people feel when faced by common adversity. Kennedy’s program, which was welcomed by the building materials and construction industries, foresaw the fallout shelter as yet another feature of the suburban home... And the family, not the community, became the key unit of survival. This was so clear a reflection of the way in which American society perceived itself at the time that the novelty of the approach was scarcely noticed.

But the part of the fallout shelter that I wish to focus on here, is the well-stocked 1960s pantry. (Click on the photo above for post-apocalyptical product placement of a number of surviving brandname foods: Campbell’s, Lipton, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Spam, etc.)

Better Homes and Gardens... identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly  changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe

The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:

...in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. ... The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

(One more well-stocked fallout shelter, after the fold...)

Presidential Packaging as Op Art

(Not optical-illusion “op art,” but opinion/editorial op-ed art.)

Yesterday’s batch of editorials in the NY Times, about President Obama’s prospects for a future term, were illustrated with satirical cleaning products.

By no means is this the first time we’ve compared our President to packaged goods. These black & white packages above (by Abbott Miller and Kristin Spilman from Pentagram) hark back to an earlier book cover for The Selling of the President 1968 (on right).

One thing I’m puzzling over—the illustrations are definitely black & white in my edition of the the paper and online, but in Richard Shear’s copy, the illustrations were apparently in full color, or so he claims.

Either Connecticut is getting a much fancier edition of the NY Times than they deliver here on Staten Island, or there is some powerful, packaging/color synesthesia at work here! (Such that: we’re so accustomed to seeing brightly colored packages that, even when they are reproduced in black & white, our minds supply the color.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Nathan Gibb’s Crayola Monologues

On left: Nathan Gibb’s crayon collection, illustrating Crayola’s 1962 name change from “Flesh” to “Peach”; on right: an 8-pack box of Crayola’s “Multicultural Crayons” (both photos are from Nathan Gibb’s Flickr Photostream)

When I was a kid growing up in Florida—(where orange juice & Caucasian-suntans were the dominant norm)—I somehow settled on the orange crayon as the one that most embodied the ideal skin color.

Last Friday’s post about patented crayon packaging included one box, in which the crayons represented people—(clowns in a circus text). The video below, however, takes the crayons-as-people analogy to its logical conclusion: as a metaphor for skin color.

Nathan Gibb’s 2003 Crayola Monologues “uses the crayon as a human metaphor for exploring color and identity in the United States” as well as pointing out Crayola’s (and our culture’s) recent history of race-based color names for crayons.

Regarding my own childhood choice of orange as a skin color, I’m thinking that it must have been partly due to a limited pallet of the 8 original colors. If I’d had the color choices contained in the “Multicultural Crayons” box, above, perhaps I would have identified with a different color.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design