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Branding & Package Design

Crime and Packaging: 2 logos

Crime and PackagingOn left: logo for Pax-Fax, Inc. (designed 1950); on right: logo for Packaging Corporation of America (designed 1962–1963)

Robert Sidney Dickens

Robert Sidney Dickens founded the Dickens Design Group in 1931. An early specialist in package design, Dickens’ Chicago-based firm designed these two logos for packaging-related companies. He was also the guy who later designed the original “TaB” logo for Coca Cola.

Lately I’ve been researching Dickens and his work and have found a lot of interesting stuff. (At least: it’s interesting to me.)  I found too much to include it all in one post, so I’ll be doling it out in bits and pieces.

Let’s call this “Robert Sidney Dickens Week” with the understanding that it may take me a month or more to actually roll it all out. Please bear with me.

Crime and Packaging

Barbara Baer Capitman included both of the logos above in her 1976 survey of American Trademark Designs. (She also included 18 other logos by Dickens Design Group.)

The packaging part of these 2 logos will be obvious, but “Where’s the crime?” you ask.

Asked and answered, after the fold… [Read more…]

Do more with “dust flaps” (4 ways)

If you’re naturally detail-oriented like me, then you zero in on clever ways of putting arcane packaging details like “dust flaps” to better use.

Dust Flaps

What are “dust flaps”? They’re those flaps attached to either side at the opening of a folding carton. They make the box a bit stronger and they’re supposed to keep dust and other foreign particles out. (Although, if the contents of your box are particularly particulate, then you could also say that they keep the particles in.)

Closing a box, these are the smaller flaps that you fold in before you tuck in the tuck flap. Opening a box, these flaps are the last thing you’ll see before the box is fully open.

Here are 4 ways of getting more mileage from those unassuming dust flaps. [Read more…]

Packaged (past tense): Can of Worms

Can of Worms

A metaphor for something you should never start: a can of worms. In this case, however, “Worms” was “a cherry blended soda.”

LADCo (the Larry and Duane Company) launched this product in 1974.

Who exactly were Larry and Duane? I’ve spent way too much time recently, trying to answer that question.

Through a forum discussion of the product on inthe70s.com, I learned that they both worked for Pepsi-Cola in Wisconsin.

“Duane” was Duane G. Paulson who worked at Pepsi in New Richmond, WI. Larry worked at Pepsi in the town of Frederic, but Larry’s last name eludes us.

Worms soda was the brainchild of my uncle, Duane then working as a Pepsi distributor in New Richmond WI. He hatched the idea for the name while seeing a young boy fishing while driving his routes. Worms became a regional hit in Northern WI and MN and represented a manifestation of Duane’s unorthodox ways and thinking, always ready to mix things up a bit.

Jon – March 23, 2008

My father, Duane Paulsen, and my mother Verna Paulsen created “Can full of worms” soda in the seventies when I was a small boy.

J Paulsen, May 27, 2012

The franchise was created in 1974 by LADCo (the Larry and Duane Company). Jon’s Uncle Duane and my dad Larry were both working at Pepsi then — Duane in New Richmond and Larry in Frederic. The marketing designs for the cans, the t-shirts, etc was completed at my dad’s kitchen table. The franchise was sold to a group in Oregon in the early ’80’s.

Craig – June 21, 2008

Naming and Design

Craig’s description above suggests that Larry might have designed or supervised the design of the packaging. But who created the illustration of the goofy kid’s face with the red wooden sign? Someone sitting at that kitchen table?

On one side of the can they wrote “I like WORMS” and on the other side they wrote “Best WORMS You Ever Tasted.”

Can of Worms

Because of these dual messages on the red signs, there’s some confusion about the brand name.

[Read more…]

Golden Boy Brand (fish sauce)

Golden Boy Brand fish sauce (Droste effect packaging)Golden Boy Brand fish sauce label: hi-res photo is from Jenna Osborne’s Forging Health in a Sick World (One Dish at a Time)

Earlier this year, Debby and I stopped in at Spice Rack, an Indian grocery store on Staten Island. While we were there, Debby noticed a Droste effect package that we’d never seen before.

Packaging within Packaging

A rack of fish sauce bottles. On each label a baby boy holds a bottle of fish sauce with a picture of himself holding the same bottle. Neither the illustration nor the resolution of the printing allow for infinite regression. Still, Golden Boy’s label gives us a little taste of infinity. I count two, maybe three iterations of packaging within packaging.

I’ve been collecting examples of this particular packaging phenomenon since 2008 so I asked her to take a phone picture. (Her photo is the one on the right.)

Tang Heab Seng Fish Sauce Factory Co., Ltd. manufactures the brand. The entire Golden Boy Brand product line is shown below.

While they’ve given their labels a consistent brand identity, their containers are not so consistent. Instead they use hodgepodge of mismatched stock bottles. The company may have fiscally sound and practical reasons for choosing each of these bottles, but the overall effect reminds me a little bit of Peter Cuba’s fictitious Budweiser brand extensions.

But there’s something else, uh fishy about this particular assortment of bottles…

[Read more…]

Cady Noland’s 1989 “Clip-On Man”

Cady Noland's Clip-On ManCADY NOLAND, CLIP-ON MAN, 1989, silkscreen on aluminum with aluminum tubing (via: Gagosian)

Clip-On Man

I saw this photo of Cady Noland‘s 1989 sculpture “Clip-On Man” today, for the first time. It was in 2012 when we last researched her artwork — the 1989 installation of stacked Budweiser beer six-packs, entitled: This Piece Has No Title Yet.

I’d seen other artworks by Noland with appropriated photos silk-screened onto panels, but this photo seemed different. She had sometimes incorporated news photos of Lee Harvey Oswald or Patricia Hearst. This guy, appears to have gone out on the town with a six pack of beers looped onto his belt. We see him holding the second-to-the-last can in his hand. He’s wearing a wild-looking tie and a somewhat demonic smile.

… but the real highlight was Cady Noland’s Clip On Man, conceived in collaboration with curator and critic Bob Nickas. Noland has attracted attention lately with sculptural combines that bring together “road-warrior” detritus — car parts, empty Budweiser cans, beat-up license plates — with subtly menacing artifacts suggesting bureaucratic institutions that have spun out of control; night sticks, handcuffs and hospital paraphernalia are all part of her repertoire.

In Clip On Man, a silkscreen image on aluminum of a besotted inbred, with the remainder of a six-pack of beer hanging off his belt, is mounted on a flimsy structure of metal railing and chain.

from a review in Art Issues of a 1989 group show
Benedetto, McCaslin, Mosset, Noland, Parrino, Staehle
Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York

But where did Noland find the photo? And who is this “besotted inbred” ?

Clip-On Man

Asked and answered, after the fold.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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…

[Read more…]

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