Archive for the ‘Packaging’ Category

Seed Package Art: Nice Tomatoes, Sweet Pea

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Image via http://www.thelabelman.com/

It’s been a long time since my last post and I hope I still have some readers left…maybe three or four? Excuses, excuses: I finished my thesis and graduated from the Design Criticism master’s degree program at the School of Visual Arts on May 14, and now that I’ve caught up on sleep and regenerated some brain cells (maybe three or four) I plan to post on a more regular basis in the weeks to come. You’ve been warned.

Anyway, I did manage to write this last week for the excellent idsgn.org. It was an idea proposed for an assignment given by Michael Bierut at DCrit, but somehow I ended up writing about album art instead for his class. The notion to write about seed package art stayed with me, though, and here it is just in time for spring.

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Hungry Man and Skinny Cow

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

SkinnyVHungry

The doors of American supermarkets swing open to usher us into retail fever dreams, the fabulous fairy-tale world of who corporate brands would like us to be and who we wish we were. Meanwhile, who we really are gets lost in the vast landscape. Product package design meant to appear masculine says far more about hopelessly outdated cultural assumptions than it does about real shoppers, male or female. And reduced-calorie or lowfat products pitched towards women feel very out of touch now that it’s common for members of both sexes to be concerned with weight loss.

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Interactive Layers, Old School

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Wallpaper/Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘peelable’ design for the Wallpaper* cover featuring model Baptiste Giabiconi. Photograph: IPC Media

Readers of the October issue of Wallpaper are in for some old-fashioned interactive fun. Peeling off the top layer of the cover designed by Karl Lagerfeld reveals the sultry Baptiste Giabiconi, naked, on a second cover underneath. Magazines have been trying hard recently to come up with covers that break traditional formats; remember Esquire’s light-up version in September 2008? Using e-ink technology and a battery, it wasn’t interactive or even attractive, and was a logistical nightmare—the issue needed to ship in refrigerated trucks to keep it in working order.

Sticky Fingers

Wallpaper’s new cover reminds me of Andy Warhol’s iconic design for the 1971 Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, which had its own production and practical issues (the real zipper broke through the plastic overwrap on the albums and sometimes scratched the vinyl when they were piled together in stacks). One key difference, though: your curious eyes couldn’t penetrate through the layers of image any farther than the briefs. —Angela Riechers

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Recession Aesthetics

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

DishSoapComposite

Thanks to the tanking world economy, this year I suddenly found myself confronted by a perfect storm right in my very own kitchen: I needed to obtain the vast quantities of calories required by a ravenous teenager and his younger brother without having to declare bankruptcy. The blissful era of strolling around the local food co-op with a petite handheld basket containing a single grass-fed steak at $26 and a recycled-paperboard pint of $5.99 organic raspberries was over. And so last January it came to pass that I bravely pushed a doublewide chrome shopping cart into the land of excess that is Costco. I soon realized that shopping there isn’t just about food, the experience is an education in the subtleties of how the graphic design of brands sells products to their intended audiences.

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Like Peanuts

Monday, March 16th, 2009

One last comment on vintage vending machines: Look how happy this model is pretending to be about her purchase, Love Among the Haystacks. Other books on offer here include Tropical Passions, Kept Woman, and the disturbingly-titled Finger Man. Would readers buy The Odyssey or Moby-Dick from a vending machine? No, because the context devalues the content to the level of a snack: cheap, easily consumed, not very nourishing or filling, and disposable.

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