box vox

Wooden Packaging

Top row: Anicka Yi and Maggie Peng’s cedar-encased fragrance bottles; 2nd row, left: Andrée Rouette’s ABCD veneer-covered maple syrup cans (via Packaging UQAM); 2nd row, right:  Espen Hansen’s veneer-covered AO Vinje gin box; 3rd row, left: Society27’s wooden shoebox; 3rd row, right & below: Léo Breton-Allaire’s spruce gum chewing gum concept (via: Packaging UQAM); 4th row left & below right: Maude Bussières’s detachable wooden pencils concept (via Packaging UQAM); 5th row, left: Debowa oak-encased vodka bottles; bottom row: Gerlinde Gruber’s wooden, puzzle-like jewelry box

Packages made of wood (See also: Wood Framed Bottles)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

2 More Trapezoidal Boxes

Did a round-up of trapezoidal boxes a while back. Here are two more that I thought looked good together. They’re not new.

The one on the left is Milner Gray’s modern/classic package design for a 1950s Pyrex gift set (No.3a). I like how the handle (and the dark color) make this carton look like a hefty, 1-ton weight.  (via: BurningSettlersCabin)

The one on the right is a flat, trapezoid-shaped box for the ARC6 flashlight. (Now discontinued.)

Pairing them up together, I thought the ARC’s embossed “burst” logo sort of related to the Pyrex crown logo. And it also looks, in this photo, as if the ARC6 box had a silver-grey neutral color, matching the black & white Pyrex packaging photo. That, I think, is a misperception based on a skillfully lighted “hero shot.” The ARC6 flashlight box seems to have actually been white. (via: CPF Reviews)

(Another photo, after the fold...)

Polyhedral Butter Pack Patent

Albert Lowenfel, president of the Hotel Bar Butter Company until retiring in 1955, is credited with having invented the butter carton. (Prior to that, it was sold by the pound from large tubs.)

He began to sell butter in 1931 under a brand name and in quarter pound sticks. It took 10 years for the packaged butter to catch on.

from Albert Lowenfels’ obituary in the Norwalk Hour, June 5, 1969

One of Lowenfels’ inventions that did not catch on was the triangular, prism-shaped carton above. (See also: Close Packing)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Hexagonal Halloween Candy Package Design

(A vintage, hexagonal, head-shaped carton with a jack-o’-lantern style die-cut face.) According to the Candy Professor:

“This hexagonal carton is an award winning package distributed by the Sierra Candy Company in 1956.”

Not clear who designed the package or what entitity awarded the award. The same box appears to have also been used by the J.D. Fine Candy Company. (Color photos are from Bindlegrim’s Flickr Photostream; the black and white photo is from Confectioners’s Journal, April 1956)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

3 More Accordion Packs

In August we looked at some accordion-like packages that featured “bellows” mechanisms that allowed them to expand and contract. More examples have been popping up recently...

1. Nick Seville’s “Shaker Straws” duplicate the effect of a bendable straw. His solution to an assignment about packaging-as-added-value:

“...the brief was to repackage a pound shop item to make it worth double the price. This was achieved by creating a product that stood out on the shelves and made it more interactive for the customer to get a feel for the product.”

Consumers might regard it as a cynical ploy —a package designed to double the price of an item— but it does serve as an important reminder that an elaborate package will surely increase the retail price of a product.

2. Éva Valicsek’s “egg box” uses an accordion-like structure for egg packaging. Here the structure mainly serves to provide stabililty for the eggs, but the flexibility of the bellows structure allows the eggs to be easily inserted or removed from the carton.

Her labeling scheme also includes the barcode as a graphic design element —(similar to a CD package we looked at in 2009).

3. Directions Marketing’s “Tritainer” dog food concept (Grand Prize Winner in “Project 2020: The Consumer Experience”) makes compression a key feature:

“Accordion-type compression reduces container height as product is dispensed, and when empty, the container eventually folds flat for easy recyclability.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Chained Tetrahedral Portion Packs

I saw Serge Rhéaume’s 3-pack powdered drink concept (above left) on Packaging|UQAM and my first thought was that it was another example of packaging in which individual portions are contained in connected polyhedral shapes. (See: Chained Polyhedral Portion Packs)

But as a chain of tetrahedron-shaped packages it also reminded me of something else... The most successful and well-known tetrahedron-shaped packages are Ruben Rausing’s Tetra-Pak (classic), which are similarly connected in a chain during manufacture, but then cut apart. (See inset)

The inspiration for Tetra-Pak’s manufacturing process, reportedly came to Rausing while watching his wife making sausages. (Note: sausages are also available as manufactured — in a chain of connected individual portions.)

The idea of selling multipacks of connected tetrahedrons is a very good one, and Rhéaume is not the first to think of it.

The illustration above, right is from Wolfgang Jobmann’s 1999 European patent for a “Chain of Individual Packages”...

Packaging arrangement for soft drinks
A packaging arrangement consists of a series of five individual tetrahedral packs (A, B, C, D, E) each of which is linked to the neighboring pack by a flat strip (10, 11, 12, 13). The strip has a line of perforations by which individual packs may be removed from the group of five.

(Jobmann’s 1999 patent and others, after the fold...)

Polyhedral Light Bulb Packaging(Structural Package Design Patent from 1970)

Bryon L. Lessar’s octahedral “Package for Light Bulbs” was patented in 1972.

(First page of Lessar’s patent appears, after the fold...)

Honeycombs and Structural Package Design: More Ways of Taking Up Space

I recently received an email from an eminant mathematician, citing errors in a 2008 post in which I listed the 5 polyhedral shapes with regular faces that could be arranged in space-filling “honeycomb” configurations. I went back and reconsidered my earlier survey and realized that I had, indeed, made a mistake.

Although I was apparently correct about the number of space-filling polyhedrons with regular faces, one of the examples I gave did not belong in the set: the rhombic dodecahedron.

There are only five space-filling convex polyhedra with regular faces: the triangular prism, hexagonal prism, cube, truncated octahedron, and gyrobifastigium.

Wolfram MathWorld

If the point had been that all the faces be “regular,” I should have included the gyrobifastigium—two joined triangular prisms (above). The rhombic dodecahedron (below) while highly symmetrical with identically shaped (congruent) faces, did not fit the bill, since each of those faces was rhombus-shaped and therefore not regular.

Really, I should have just omitted “regular faces” as a requirement. For our purposes here, there’s nothing about the squares, equilateral triangles, regular hexagons, etc. that makes these five polyhedral shapes more suitable as packages. If the point had been that the packages should fit together with no space in between, there are many more than five examples. How many?

Being careful to avoid contributing any further to the misinformation on the internet... I would have to say, (based on what I read about space-filling polyhedra on Wolfram’s MathWorld site) that the number is in the 100s. At least.

Another space-filling polyhedron (with non-regular faces) that I like pretty well is the trapezo-rhombic dodecahedron.

I also like Ruggero Gabbrielli’s space-filling polyhedron below with 13 faces...

“A new space-filling polyhedron with 13 faces. Halfway between the rhombic dodecahedron and the truncated octahedron.”

There are also space-filling polyhedrons with concave portions that fit together in interesting, puzzle-like ways.

The Wolfram site mentions an attempt do a fuller reckoning of all the space-filling possibilites:

“In the period 1974-1980, Michael Goldberg attempted to exhaustively catalog space-filling polyhedra... more space-fillers have been found subsequently... A modern survey would be welcome.”

You know who would not be qualified to do a survey like that? ...

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Boxes with Diagonal Motif

I don’t have a good name for this effect. The rectangular sufaces of the top two boxes are more or less bisected into two triangles, which (depending on how these areas are colored) can create geometric “wrap-around” effects.

And the side panels of the “Stella in Two“ boxes by Made Thought are also divided by diagonal lines. (via)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Geografia’s Polyhedral Planet

We went to Gift Fair last week (NYIGF) and one of the booths where I lingered the longest belonged to Geografia, a company that makes polyhedral paper globe kits, among other things.

When I saw the cube-shaped globe, above left, I said, “I bet that‘s a magic cube.” Sure enough the “Earth & Sky Twistable Globe” was a fully-functioning, folding and unfolding “magic cube” made from 8 smaller cubes—(the same sort of cube as our own Gumball Cube Pack).

In one state, the “Twistable Globe” shows a map of the world. Turned inside-out, it shows a map of the stars. (Really like the inside-outside / introvert-extrovert idea of this.)

Another intriguing reversible globe was their “Lands & Nations Flippable Globe” which was very similar to Jessica Comin’s “laranja mecánica” that we looked at recently. In her case, the cube could be turned inside-out to form a rhombic dodecahedron. The “Flippable Globe” is a cube that can be turned inside-out to form a regular dodecahedron. And its parts are tabbed, rather than permanently hinged together.

The projection of maps onto polyhedral shapes is something that Buckminster Fuller and others have also explored, but Geografia’s products manage to provide fascinating new polyhedral perspectives and (geo)graphic insights.

Here’s a video showing one of their “Sectional Globes” being assembled...

(We’ll be featuring more stuff from Gift Fair over the next week or two.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Polyhedral Pineapple

Very appealing, pineapple-shaped package by Victor Branding Lab uses three hexagonal antiprism boxes in a polypropylene bag. (For TK Food’s pineapple pastry) Via: Lovely Package

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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

2 Oranges: Geometry, Packaging & Ultaviolence

Violent, polyhedral orange chocolate packaging—two kinds:

1. Jessica Comin’s “laranja mecánica” chocolate package (based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange) starts out as a rhombic-dodecahedron which can be turned inside out to form a cube. Although the book and the movie made “ultraviolence” a household word, Comin’s packaging concept is violent only to the extent that one empathizes with a box being turned inside out. (via)

One remarkable thing about her transformable pack, is that both shapes—a cube and a rhombic-dodecahedron—will “close pack.” In fact, the rhombic-dodecahedron was the one close-packing shape that I was still on the lookout for. (The other four close-packing polyedrons with regular faces were already accounted for.)

Like our own interactive Gumball cube-pack, “laranja mecánica” is a novel candy package holding a minimal amount of candy. I figure, only 6 chocolate eyeballs, assuming that one goes into each of the 6 pyramid shaped compartments below.

A similar polyhedral model was constructed by W. W. Ross in the late 1800s. His “Exploded Cube” (below) is part of The University of Arizona’s collection of his dissected wooden polyhedrons.

 

And there’s an animated illustration from Apollonius Math showing how this transformation works...

2. Terry’s Chocolate Oranges (below) also involve polyhedral dissection, but, in Terry’s case, it’s a sphere of chocolate that gets dissected along longitudinal lines.

As for the violence, it’s implicit in the “whack & unwrap” instructions. Many of their television commercials have fun with exaggerating the violence required to open the package. Interesting to note that, in the photo above, the foil-wrapped chocolate orange, was, itself, packaged in a clamshell—the very thing that “wrap rage” was named for.

(The “violent” Whack & Unwrap campaign, after the fold...)

Interlocking Bottles

Two similar designs for interlocking bottles:

On left: Karim Rashid’s 2003 “Pour Hommes 2 in 1” for Issey Miyake (Men).

On right: Joy Lin’s 2011 envisioned redesign for a Hustler lubricant set.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Magic Folding Cans

Aside from yesterday’s example, most “magic folding cubes” are not packages, although some of them are designed to resemble packaging.

And among the various “magic folding cube” structures are topologically-similar cylindrical versions, sometimes called “magic cans” ...

(More photos and video, after the fold...)

Gumball Cube Pack

©2011 Randy Ludacer, Beach Packaging Design

Seeing projects like Sophie Valentine’s “Capitalism vs. Socialism” and Regina Rebele’s 2008 “Type-Cube” made me wonder if there was a practicable way that this type of “magic folding cube” could be designed as a box to actually contain something.

Ideally, I would have liked it best if the whole thing—all 8 boxes with tucks & glue flaps—could have been folded from a single die-cut shape. That doesn’t appear to be possible, although it was easy enough to get it down to just 4 pieces which must then be hinged together.

But what sort of product should such a package contain? Gumballs, I decided. Stupid, I guess, to envision such an elaborate package for such an inexpensive product, but demographically appropriate as a candy pack for kids. Like something that Topps might have considered doing in the 1970s. And as our video clearly shows, these gumballs really needed to be contained.

Anyway, this is just Gumball Cube-Pack Mach 1. There are some further structural improvements I have in mind to try next. (If you’re listening, Topps, please give us call. We’d love to hook you up.)

(Some still photos, after the fold...)

Muffets: Son of Shredded Wheat

In addition to the cereal cup shown at the end of last Thursday’s post, another food that Scott H. Perky (son of Shredded Wheat inventor, Henry D. Perky) invented was “Muffets: The Round Shredded Wheat.” (AKA: “The All-Year-Round Cereal”)

I was twelve when shredded wheat was born, and worked and played in father’s laboratory. I grew up under the influence of his enthusiasms, worked in every department of his factory, made some inventions of my own, and in 1920 invented Muffets. Now I am, myself, conservatively but with great hopes, introducing what I consider the first new departure since my father’s in the line of popular “cereals.”

Scott H. Perky
from a letter to the editor,
Time Magazine, Jan. 21, 1929

Just as Henry Perky’s Shredded Wheat Company was eventually bought out by Nabisco, so too was son, Scott Perky’s Muffets Brand bought out by Quaker Oats.

This 1930s hexagonal box (via Worthpoint) must be one of the earliest versions of the Quaker Oats Muffets box. A package design with a number interesting features:

a. It’s a close-packing hexagonal prism.

b. It has a faux die-cut window revealing a trompe l’oeil illustration of the product contained within.

c. The biscuits illustration also serves as an orthographic diagram of the package contents (albeit from just one angle).

d. At one end of the box there is a seal-of-approval type graphic burst, guaranteeing that “if you do not agree that these are the best whole wheat biscuits you have ever used we shall gladly remit the cost of this package.”

e. On the bottom panel (not pictured here) the ingredients are listed: “Whole Wheat, Irradiated Dry Yeast. Each Biscuit provides 50% of the Minimum Daily Requirement of Vitamin D”

In 1923, Harry Steenbock and James Cockwell discovered exposure to ultraviolet light increased the Vitamin D concentration in food. After discovering that irradiated rat food cured the rats of rickets, Steenbock sought a patent. Steenbock then assigned the patent to the newly established Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. WARF then licensed the technology to Quaker Oats for use in their breakfast cereals.

from Wikipedia’s entry on the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

According to Wikipedia, “Irradiated food does not become radioactive, but in some cases there may be subtle chemical changes...”

At the other end of the box is a serving tip about how you can cut out the centers to use the biscuits as “patty shells.” Nowhere on the package do the words “breakfast” or “cereal” appear.

(Some later versions of Quaker Oats Muffets packaging, after the fold...)

Lamp Packaging / Packaging Lamp

1. Lamp Packaging: As a designer of polyhedral lamps, Tom Dixon is no slouch in the area of complex symmetries, but the packaging for his Etch Light (a deltoidal icositetrahedron) is a standard rectangular box.

In fact, the only polyhedral package for a Tom Dixon lamp that I’ve ever seen was the dodecahedron-shaped box for his discontinued “Star Light.”

The rectangluar box for the “Etch Light” was designed by Mind Design:

“We designed a functional packaging range and a series of different patterns for Tom Dixon’s new ‘Etch Light’. The first versions of this self-assembly lamp shades were launched in Milan as part of the Tom Dixon Factory. Respect to the Op-Art masters of the 60’s who designed even more complex graphic patterns without any help of a computer...”

2. Packaging Lamp: While the economic constraints of carton construction & shipping may have led Dixon away from polyhedral packaging for his own products, he has recently gone in the other direction and made polyhedral lamps from rectangular boxes.

His “Comet Lamp” (above right) was made from reconstructed Veuve Clicquot “DesignBoxes” as part of their “Out of The Box” promotion:

“I created the Comet lamp... while looking at the DesignBox and thinking of the technical complexity of the cardboard object with such a simple appearance. Think of the beauty of simple shapes, of the way in which the geometry is everywhere present in design, and then think of the natural progression of simple mathematical forms, from the cube to the square; this enables us as designers to create infinite possibilities by starting from the simplest point of departure! ... A Comet lamp, beneficent and sparkling, like champagne, based on the universally attractive laws of geometry, from the starting point of a simple, well-made cardboard box”

(Both lamps in the light of day, after the fold...)

McSweeney’s Head Box

Recently spotted at Barnes & Nobel: Issue No. 36 of McSweeney’s Quarterly—a “head box” with illustrations by Matt Furie. (Note: Illustration on bottom of box shows that this is actually a severed head box.)

This package features the kind of orthographic graphic design we’ve discussed before, but usually it’s the contents of the box that are projected onto the side panels. Here, it’s more like a “serving suggestion” of what you might make of the box’s contents—(your head being the presumptive destination of the ideas contained).

But besides serving as a repository for literary contents, an orthographically projected head also makes a nice diagram to explain our human predisposition toward rectangular, Cartesian coordinates. With eyes facing forward, an ear on either side, it’s only natural we navigate the world in egocentric, rectangular directions: forward, backward, left, right, up, down.

In an earlier post about close-packing polyhedrons, I wondered why packaging so often seems to skew rectangular. Egocentric coordinates could be one explanation. Our skulls may be round, but our ideas are definitely square.

The video below shows what’s in the box.
(The sound track is: “Poodle in the Hen House”)

(See also: Skull Bottles and Our Family of Products)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Toblerone Fractal Pack

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