box vox

Cutty Sark Pack Strap (Tumpline Demo)

This past Summer I picked up a self-published booklet entitled “Tumpline and Paddle — Five Weeks in Quebec” at a church-run thrift shop in southern NJ.

Written and printed in 1970 by John Rotch (at The Cabinet Press, Milford, N.H.) it documents a “wilderness canoe trip” and was apparently published as part of a school assignment.

Initially, I bought the booklet because I liked these photographs of the author using a vintage Cutty Sark Whisky carton to demonstrate the proper use of the “tumpline.”

One of the most important pieces of equipment on our trip was the tumpline...

Webster’s New International Dictionary says that “tumpline” is “of Algonquin; origin; Massachuset tempan, a pack strap, Abenaki madumbi. A kind of sling formed by a strap slung over the forehead or chest and used by one carrying a pack on his back...”

John Rotch, Tumpline and Paddle

But aside from worldly product placement of a name-brand Scotch whisky box serving as proxy for the traditional wooden “wanigan” — there’s also something poetically fitting about Rotch’s carefully roped rigging around a box that features Cutty Sark’s full-rigged sailing ship logo.

(Rotch demonstrates the tumpline in use, after the fold...)

The Entenmann’s Box as Metaphor

The Entenmann’s box with the see-through window is sometimes used as a metaphor. Usually this has to do with ideas about tranparency. The Wacky Pack “Antenmann’s” parody sticker (on the left) compared the Entenmann’s see-through window to a window on an ant farm. The shrink-wrapped Entenmann’s box on the right is an advertising promotion: a deck of Entenmann’s box-shaped playing cards. Strange for playing cards to have a see-through window. If you’re playing cards, you generally want the hand you’re dealt to be for your eyes only. (See also: Wacky Packages and Playing Card Packs.)

1. Consumer
A 1996 remembrance by Wendy Wasserstein, about Martha Entenmann’s life is entitled, “She Saw Through Us.” By “us” she means Entenmann’s consumers so the metaphor is about Martha Entenmann’s early insight into our consumer behavior—that we customers were as transparent to her as the “see-through convertible bakery box top” that she invented.

2. Coffin
A character in F. Paul Wilson’s, The Tomb, while eating crumb cake, talks about wanting to be interred in an Entenmann’s box:

I’ve decided that after I’m cremated I want my ashes buried in an Entenmann’s box. Or if I’m not cremated, it should be a white, glass-topped coffin with blue lettering on the side.” He held up the cake box. “Just like this. Either way, I want to be interred on a grassy slope overlooking the Entenmann’s plant in Bay Shore.”

Another example of Entenmann’s box as coffin was found in these comments on a blog post about burying a pet parakeet:

I buried my budgie, Petey, in an empty Entenmann’s box . . . the cellophane window allowed for excellent viewing at the wake that we held for the neighborhood kids.

... Naturally, one would use the Entenmann’s box after consoling oneself with some tasty brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or cinnamon rolls.

3. “Believers” (and non-believers)
A sermon by Harold C. Warlick, Jr. entitled “People See Through Us” uses the same basic metaphor a Wendy Wasserstein—the “transparency” of people. Here, however, it is not about what Martha Entenmann sees in us, but how we look in God’s eyes...

Martha Entenmann invented the see-through cake box. Suddenly all manner of baked goods from pies to doughnuts began to arrive in see-through boxes with a proud blue Entenmann banner stamped on them. This caused those Entenmann baked goods to fill the shelves from New York to Miami.

As soon as the Christian church was organized as an institution, the letters and epistles of Paul and the epistle of James began to hammer home a message people did not want to hear. All believers and congregations are see-through to the world.  People see through us. They really do! There is a see-through box top that covers every congregation and every believer.

from Sermons on the Second Readings

Interestingly, the Entenmann’s box also plays a role in Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life...

(The Entenmann’s box as “literature-of-last-resort” after the fold...)

Egg-Shaped Earth Day

Since today is simultaneously Earth Day and Good Friday, I was looking for a way to somehow connect the earth and (Easter) eggs.

If you search online for “egg-shaped earth,” you’ll find lots of stock photos, mostly of cracked egg-shaped earths meant, I suppose, to symbolize the fragility of life on our planet. (Some even have their yokes spilling out.)

Not wanting to add anything to this already polluted metaphor (planet earth with botchulism?) it was more interesting to me to learn that there is a whole “egg-shaped earth controversy” surrounding a particular translation of the Qur'an. Hence, the video above.

Not everyone is buying it, however. Scientists insist:

The Earth is not quite spherical, due to what is know as “rotational flattening.” It’s not egg-shaped, either, it’s shaped more like a pumpkin.

Earth: Round or Egg-Shaped, Newton Ask a Scientist

Clearly, we’ll have to revisit this topic on Halloween.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Mary Campbell’s Canned Food Mandala

From artist, Mary Campbell: a large canned food mandala—(much larger than pictured here)—composed of 500–700 cans will be on display on Saturday, September 25 from 1–4 pm in the parish hall at the Unitarian Church of Staten Island. (312 Filmore Street)

Based on the impermanence of buddhist sand mandalas, when the Saturday’s display is over, the food will be similarly swept away by being delivered to four food banks throughout Staten Island.

A Sand Mandala is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of a mandalas made from millions of grains of colored sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically destroyed once it has been completed to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the impermanence of all that exists.

Attendees are invited to bring cans to add to the mandala. “Mandalas are used for meditation, and so I will ask exhibit visitors to use the can mandala to meditate on hunger and people in need of food.”

Artslant

I love the idea of stacking cans according to alternative geometric symmetries. A supermarket’s stacked display of canned goods is all about the side view so consumers can see the labels. In Campbell’s sculptures, however, the more meaningful vantage point is the unbranded top view—where you can really see the arrangement. (See also: Early Stacked Packaging Displays and Close Packing)

Speaking of supermarkets, it should be noted that Shop Rite Supermarket donated 240 of the cans.

(I’m hoping to get a photo of the intallation on Saturday.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

The CardTalk Cardboard Record Player

Further clarification on the cardboard record player: the earliest patent I could find for this concept appears to have been J. Jauquet’s “Pocket Speaking Devices” (on right) filed in 1953. Another more complicated, manually-operated, foldable record-player was J.S. Weiner’s “Sound Emitting Device”—patent applied for in 1967. The more recognizable version of the concept (on left) was from the “Record Player” patent of Max Meier-Maletz, applied for in 1972.

Global Record Network (GRN)—the Christian Missionary organization that was most responsible for the relative success of this version—claims that development of this design began around 1964. They call it the “CardTalk” and used it, not for music, but for religious indoctrination. The CardTalk was prominently featured in a documentary film about the history of GRN.

(3 cardboard record-player patents, after the fold...)

Brendan Coyle's Mortal Coil Pack

It may be a symptom of my own obsessive marginalia, but after attending the “Verfall: Decadence and Decay” show this summer (curated by Ginger Shulick) the piece that really stuck with me was artist/performance artist, Brendan Coyle’s polybagged vampire teeth (upper left) with an “Eternal Life” religious tract as the header card. According to Coyle, “It was kind of like a visual caption or accompanying piece” to his larger “Candy Corpse”—(a candy-colored crime scene with high-fructose body parts, licorice string viscera and packaging evidence of candy & cigarette consumption).

What I like so much about the ‘eternal life’ polybag, is the logic and simplicity of the combination. Summing up in one gesture all that is hopeful, yet creepy about immortality. (Brendan Coyle’s mortal/immortal-coil pack.) It also set me to thinking about the hackneyed graphics of religious tracts, in general, and I even found a nice Flickr Set of them: here —(including a Spanish version of the one Coyle used.

The “sugar power” sugar cube is a bit of “found” packaging that Coyle had incorporated into an earlier performance piece and suggestive of yet another good area of arcane packaging exploration: the sugar cube.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Miraculous Reliquary Packaging

The nice blue photo of the hand-shaped Diesel Bottle (via the Dieline) reminded me of a medieval arm reliquary. Not that I can claim any credit for making this connection. Thomas Hine discussed arm reliquaries (and their connection to packaging) in his book, The Total Package:

“... the reliquary does not merely protect and give visual expression to a precious though inert object through visual expression. Rather, the relic is an active ingredient, a tool that the devout can use to literally accomplish the impossible... Like many packages, the reliquary expresses not its ingredients but its power.”

Pictured in the top row, left: Arm Reliquary of the Apostles, (Germany, Lower Saxony, Hildesheim, about 1195) from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The x-ray to the right shows that this reliquary arm does indeed contain “One large fragment of an arm bone believed by the object’s creators to be the bone of a saint.”

Bottom row, left: another shot of the Diesel Bottle. (purportedly a cast of Diesel founder, Renzo Rossi’s hand); bottom right: an “on-going” artwork entitled “Reliquary” by John Salvest, begun in 1990  

...is constructed from a found glass hand and his own fingernail clippings, “began as a satirical homage to my Catholic upbringing and its odd history of venerating saint’s bones and splinters from the true cross, as well as an ironic commentary on the absurdly elevated status sometimes applied to artists in the modern era.”

He continues, “Every two weeks or so for the past eighteen years I have sat before the hand, opened its bright green lid, and dropped my freshly-clipped nails through its middle finger. Like an overturned hourglass, the hand is slowly but surely filled with physical evidence of my existence. What began as a light-hearted gesture has evolved into something else. Each deposit of bodily detritus into the jar is a bittersweet exercise. Generally speaking, we take satisfaction in the conclusion of our work, but in this case the completion date is unknown and not eagerly anticipated. “Reliquary” will only be finished when I am. With each passing year this habitual meditation on mortality has taken on added meaning as family, friends, and pets have been physically subtracted from my life.”

Arkansas State University news release, Aug. 22, 2008

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Bilingual Vimto Can (w/bottle)

On left: my Vimto can; on far right: a photo from Edner Robles’ Flickr Photostream

I found my bilingual Vimto can whilst walking the dog on Bay Street. English/French, but with some prominent Arabic writing, as well.

I like its cross-referential¹ bottle illustration. (The bottle contains the concentrated “cordial” version which one then dilutes, while the can contains the premixed, ready-to-drink version of the beverage.)

It contains the juice of grapes, raspberries and blackcurrants (in a 3% concentration), flavoured with herbs and spices...

It is currently made by Vimto Soft Drinks, a division of Nichols plc. It has acquired cult status amongst its consumers and celebrates its 100 year anniversary in 2008. Vimto is also manufactured under licence in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It's also considered to be the most popular drink during the holy month of Ramadan.

from the Vimto Wikipedia entry

Created as a health tonic in 1908 by John Noel Nichols, a Manchester-based wholesaler of spices and medicines. “Vimto” is a shortened version of its original name: Vim Tonic. Nichols launched his soft drink in an effort to cash in on the British temperance movement.

(More Vimto packaging, after the fold...)

Mr. Peanut Jar

Although I am a compulsive consumer of nuts, I don’t much like dry roasted nuts. Clearly, I bought this because of the package. (I’ve already stipulated to a fondness for Mr. Peanut.) The jar includes an eccentrically shaped flange in order to make the brim of Mr. Peanut’s top hat. When I’ve finished eating these [unfortunately dry roasted] peanuts, I want to see what the jar looks like without it’s full-body shrink sleeve label.

Meanwhile, it’s been recently pointed out to me how Mr. Peanut’s supposedly elegant, old-school tipping-of-the-hat gesture with pinky and index finger extended  might actually be an encoded satanic salute!

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Blue Q's Planetary Virtue

Sadly, the shopping tote above was not one of the two free ones that I received at Gift Fair. In a crowded product category, Blue-Q’s bag for the passive-aggressive, ecological shopper stands apart. The Saving the Planet Shopper—(“The more you shop the more planet you save”)—is their current best seller. Never ones to partake in the “New Sincerity,” even at their most virtuous, Blue Q manages a bit of backhanded irony—which, like water, is refreshing...

(See why in the world I’m alluding to water, after the jump...)

John Edminster's Tri-tuck Closure

A while back, in my piece about “close packing” I tried to make the point that if someone wanted to create an unusual package for their product (but still fill space efficiently) there were some shapes, other than rectangular boxes, that could do this.

One of those shapes is the rhombic dodecahedron and that is the basis of the John Edminster box pictured here. Geometrically, you could think of it as half of an elongated rhombic dodecahedron or as a hexagonal prism with a rhombic-dodecahedral top.

I first learned about this box in The Packaging Designer’s Book of Patterns (by George L. Wybenga and Lászlo Roth). The pattern appears on page 498 of my edition and is called the “tri-tuck closure hexagon.”

I tracked John Edminster down (online) and he very generously sent me some samples. Formerly a teacher of packaging design at FIT in the 1990’s, he was perhaps ahead of his time in drawing connections between package design and the emerging science of fractal geometry. Incredibly, his polyhedral package designs have not yet been used in a retail package, which is a real shame because they would certainly set themselves apart on a shelf full of rectangular boxes! Edminster has also authored a Quaker tract entitled, Jesus Christ Forbids War and regularly blogs as “Thy Friend John” at Among Friends.

The dieline of this box differs slightly from the one shown in the Wybenga/Roth book because it includes a tri-fold version of a Himes lock bottom. I love the way Edminster was able to engineer the shape of the tuck flaps to work with these alternative polyhedral geometries—(like a rhombic dodecahedron!)

It’s all well and good to know your way around the construction of a rectangular box, but to envision the possibility of a “tri-tuck closure”—three flaps tucking into one another in way that looks almost woven—that, I think, requires an intuitive grasp of the more exotic polyhedrons.

(See another John Edminster tri-tuck closure box after the jump.)

Reverend Billy on Packaging

"What Would Jesus Buy?", the documentary film produced by Morgan Spurlock and directed by Rob VanAlkemade, comes out on DVD May 20

Seems like an appropriate time to share my interview with Reverend Billy. (This being Sunday and all.) Following the thread of my earlier Dieline post about package designers striving to be good, Reverend Billy and his “Church of Stop Shopping” should be of interest to any package designer aspiring to an ethical “higher ground.”

For the uninitiated, Reverend Billy and his congregation stage “retail interventions” in which they enter major retail stores posing as average consumers, only to commit some humorous act of anti-consumerist agitprop: exhibiting tragic symptoms of mass buyer’s remorse, exorcizing cash registers, etc. Box vox attended last Sunday’s Fabulous Worship Service at Saint Mark’s Church where the Stop Shopping Choir performed their rousing, gospel-tinged, anti-consumer-culture anthems and the good Reverend Billy made some compelling points about the insidious way that “shopping” becomes something sacrosanct in this country:

How can we forget after 9/11 Bush/Cheney/Giuliani sang in 3 part harmony: “If you love your country you will go out and shop.” Consumerism says ALL of American life is best run by the market. Security, parks, transportation, emergency response, garbage removal, education… things that we owned and controlled together in our democracy—are in private, for-profit hands. We keep it going by consuming it.

Reverend Billy

I asked Reverend Billy 4 questions about packaging:

box vox:  What your feelings are about retail product packaging?

Reverend Billy: We like pleasing design, of course. The pleasure of life is the pleasure of beauty and that can happen anywhere. It happens that packaging now is a key indicator, tied to shipping, advertising and waste—even the word “package” has become a signifier of the Evil Monoculture!

So it is not the people who design who deserve a scolding—it is all of us—for creating this avalanche of plastic, this hypnosis of advertising that flow from the framing, packaging, carrying and shipping of products. We are the consumers and we have allowed this to get out of hand. It comes down on citizens as unclean manufacturing, as fossil fuel shipping, and after the purchase—as waste. It has become extreme, that's all.

There is another economy available to us where the packaging is human hands... Farmer’s markets, thrift and barter and swap economies like Craig's List—there is a growing more home-made economy that doesn’t have to be vacu-packed...

(more photos and Reverend Billy answers 3 more questions after the jump)

Hate Group Branding

Westboro Baptist Church has an unholy affection for the font: ITC Kabel.   

I recently saw the disturbing documentary, “Fall from Grace” by filmmaker K. Ryan Jones. The film follows the activities of a fundamentalist “group” from Topeka,  Kansas—(pretty much just one family)—who have managed to alienate everyone (left, right and in between) with their peculiar fusion of gay-bashing and anti-americanism.

Westboro Baptist Church is led by Pastor Fred Phelps, a lawyer who was disbarred in the mid-90s for witness intimidation, who started the church fifty years ago. It is a small group, comprised mostly of members of the Phelps family, but their hatred is prolific. They demonstrate anywhere they feel that their message is applicable, like the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming student who was killed for being gay and most recently, at the funerals of military servicemen and women killed in Iraq.

—from the film's online synopsis

(a photo of the filmmaker and more to read after the jump)