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Branding & Package Design

Box Interiors #5: the inner life of packaging

Top left: Michel Valois of Ches Valois used 2-sided printing to give the boxes for Hedda produits cosmétiques naturels a bright orange interior; on right: Ritual  founder Katerina Markov Schneider chose a bright yellow for the interior of her vitamin’s shipping cartons; lower left: Manual Creative gave the corrugated carton for the Soma water filtration system a bright blue interior; on right: The Fount gave the box for Nature’s Beauty aloe vera a bright green interior.

The inner life of packaging

For the fifth and final day of “Box Interiors Week,” we bring you 4 boxes with different colors printed inside. We used to invest all of our effort on the outside of the package rather than the inside. Since products typically needed to compete for attention on the shelf. Why pay for 2-sided printing if the inside color is hidden? Why should we pay any attention to the inner life of packaging? Because it creates a better impression when you open the box.

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Box Interiors #4: Agnes Cupcakes vs Lauras Bakery

Day 4 of “Box Interiors Week”

Following the thread of colored box interiors, today we pivot from contemporary sculpture to commercial packaging.

I think that the three boxes on the right demonstrate the concept nicely.

At first I assumed that a brand named “Agnes Cupcakes” would have been founded by a woman named Agnes. That was naive, perhaps.

I searched, but could turn up no such “Agnes.”

And then, to my surprise, I discovered “Lauras Bakery” — another Danish take-out shop with a very similar logo, whose take-out cartons also had color interiors.

I don’t speak Danish, but I saw at least one website referring to the two brands as sisters. Were Agnes and Laura sisters1 competing in the same industry? Or were they more like sister brands?

We answer these questions and others, after the fold…

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Box Interiors #3: Pieroth’s “0,175 qm”

For day 3 of “Box Interiors Week,” we bring you Kirsten Pieroth‘s “0,175 qm.” She exhibited this sculpture in a 2011 group show in Milan, entitled Segalega.

My first thought was to pair her sculpture with Hreinn Friðfinnsson’s 1992-2014 “Source” lined with black paper.

Where Friðfinnsson lined the inside of his box/sculpture with black paper, Pieroth painted the inside of her box/sculpture white. Where he only changes the color of the interior base and sides of his boxes, Pieroth includes the inside upper flaps of her box in the transformation. Jose Dávila also treated the inside upper flaps as part of the interior in his gold-plated boxes.

But, on second thought, I think I’ve found a better angle.

Looking at the box she’d painted, I assumed (at first) that it was a consumer-product shipping carton. I searched for the German brand name printed on the box, however, and discovered that it was nothing of the sort.

Realizing now, what type of box this is, I decided to approach it differently. Comparing it to Friðfinnsson’s box with the black interior didn’t seem so interesting.

More about the original box and the (possible) insight it offers, after the fold…

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Box Interiors #2: Dávila’s gold-leafed cardboard boxes

Jose Dávila's gold-leafed cardboard boxes

gold-leafed cardboard boxes

Like Hreinn Friðfinnsson in our previous post, Jose Dávila employed a similar idea in his group of Un Mundo Raro (“Strange World”) sculptures.

Like Friðfinnsson, Dávila took ordinary corrugated cardboard boxes and gave them a surprising interior. But instead of fluorescent color paper, he lined his boxes with gold leaf. And where Friðfinnsson used plain, unsullied shipping cartons, Dávila boxes reveal a previous life of heavy use.

Ostensibly, these sculptures are part of Dávila’s “Judd Series.”

During the 60s, American artist Donald Judd started his celebrated series of wall-mounted sculptures expanding from the ceiling to the floor, reflecting about the use of space. … made of materials that the artist considered to be ‘humble’. [Subscribing] to Judd’s methods,  … Dávila takes this consideration to a new level with the reproduction of the work using materials that turn out to be even more ‘humble’. When using found cardboard boxes — considered to be remnants or waste; the artist makes a comment on Minimalism, resuming Judd’s interest to inquire on the origin and source of materials used to create an artwork.

One can easily see the connection to Judd’s work in Dávila’s wall mounted sculpture, Untitled (2007) on the right. I would argue, however, that his gold-leafed cardboard boxes stand up very well on their own.

The contrast between the beat up cardboard boxes and their golden interiors is striking. How strange for such ‘humble’ boxes to be given a patina of precious metal. On the inside, no less!

More Un Mundo Raro, after the fold.

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Box Interiors #1: Friðfinnsson’s fluorescent Floor Pieces

fluorescent box interiors3 cardboard carton “floor piece” sculptures with fluorescent box interiors by Hreinn Friðfinnsson, 1992-2015

Box Interiors Lined with Fluorescent Paper

Icelandic artist, Hreinn Friðfinnsson lined these “floor piece” box sculptures with fluorescent paper. I think they’re each entitled “Source,” but I could be wrong about that.

What is it that’s so compelling about these boxes? I think it’s the contrast between the plain brown corrugated cardboard and the unexpectedly vivid interior color. And Friðfinnsson clearly did not use post-consumer shipping boxes. These are crisp new folding cartons that have never been on a UPS truck.

Friðfinnsson, of course, has made plenty of artwork that does not involve boxes. Since packaging is our primary focus, however, we’ll be focusing on his box-interior artworks…

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A simpler approach to auxetic package design

In our previous post proposing a new kind of auxetic package design, we started with some breathtakingly complex models. That was counter-intuitive, perhaps. Maybe it’s better for us to walk before we run. As amazing as they are, those complex structures are hard to get your head around. It’s easier to grasp these transformations when they’re 2-dimensional.

Toys from Trash

Alison Grace Martin‘s video above is a good place to start. She posted this video as part of her toys-from-trash album on Flickr. She hinged 9 boxes (that appear to be milk cartons) together with tape. In this way, she shows us how we might extrude a 2-dimensional auxetic structure into 3-dimensional packaging. Her kinetic 9-pack of boxes transform in the same way as  Adrian Rossiter‘s animated gif of planar “jitterbugging” squares (above right).

How is this a “simpler” approach? Because we are confining our hinged boxes to movements that can be made by polygons in a 2-dimensions plane. This is similar to an idea we’ve suggested before. (See: The Haberdasher’s Package and Chained Polyhedral Portion Packs)

The difference this time, is that we can design multi-packs capable of “jitterbug” style auxetic transformations. A few have already experimented with this idea.

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Auxetic Packaging

top: Taneli Luotoniemi’s 2015 “Jitterbox”; bottom: one of Bertoldi, Overvelde, Hoberman & Weaver’s recent foldable structures

Auxetic Packaging?

Auxetics are structures or materials that have a negative Poisson’s ratio. When stretched, they become thicker perpendicular to the applied force.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Auxetics

Is “auxetic packaging” really a thing? Most of the references I’ve found to packaging applications seem to be nano-scale. (Auxetic cushioning foams and the like.)

But there are others (artists and researchers) who are experimenting with folded paper and cardboard. And some of these models look (to me) like an intriguing new frontier in structural packaging design.

We have videos and information about two projects in particular (shown above), after the fold.

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