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Branding & Package Design

Canned Museum Beer #2: Beer Can Library

Beer Can Library wide

For part 2 of our “Canned Museum Beer” series, we bring you Virgil Marti‘s 1997 “Beer Can Library” wallpaper installation.

imagesBeer Can Library

This is called Beer Can Library. It’s a four color screen print reproduction of my beer can collection from when I was a teenager.

… I started with a formal idea of the tradition of trompe l’oeil wallpapers where oftentimes it would be a library. Wallpaper that would look like shelves and books. You put it up and it makes it look like you have a great big library. But I was taking my collection of beer cans and applying that to that idea.

07_contdesign_jp271010I liked that this piece could function as a sort of removed self portrait in a way. It wasn’t really my beer can collection. But it could have actually been any boy of my era’s beer can collection. There was something sort of personal and generic about it at the same time which is really interesting to me.

This is the entire print. It goes on for 33 feet before it starts over. It’s all alphabetized and it goes from domestic cans to European cans to oversized cans, and then it repeats again — and they are actual sized…

Virgil Marti, John M. Anderson Lecture Series

In addition to the intentions that Marti stipulated to above, he is also placing a more disreputable type of collection into a museum context. What makes beer can collections so disreputable?

[More images and further thoughts on Marti’s “Beer Can Library,” after the fold…] [Read more…]

Canned Museum Beer #1: Switch House

Canned-Tate-Museum-Beer

This is Peter Saville‘s new design for Tate Modern‘s new “Switch House” pale ale.

Saville is a British graphic designer. We’ve mentioned him a couple times before. (See also: More Transparent Branding and Blue Monday: color coded branding)

Saville worked with Tate Design Studio on the packaging design, which is silver with brightly coloured geometric artwork.

Peter Saville designs packaging for Tate Modern pale ale
Dezeen, July 25, 2016

The museum beer packaging is an extension of Saville’s color-coded brand identity for Tate Modern’s “Switch House” gallery in London. The beer take its name from the building—a former power station and was brewed by Fourpure Brewing.

I hadn’t realized that art museums were now selling beer as a consumable sort of brand collateral. Tate Modern, however, appears to having been doing this a while now.

Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London’s famous art galleries, have introduced its own gin and limited edition beers…

The Tate’s exclusive range of beer will be labelled with art work inspired by the latest exhibitions held at the London galleries.

The Tate launches gin and beer, Drinks International, 2013

FMCG as Art

For the Switch house beer can, the designers used Saville’s abstracted diagram of the building on the front of the can, and then tucked the museum’s brand logotype tastefully out of sight at the back of the can.

Switchhouse-pale-alePhotos via: Untappd

We’ve seen this kind of “designer pack” before: a familiar commercial container, incongruously devoid of any (obvious) branding.

There was a time when consumers didn’t much like commercial packaging on their dinner tables. In recent years, of course, we’ve been conditioned to accept it more and more.

Yet, for those still wishing to control their intake of branding messages, a package with “art” as a label may seem preferable to one with a prominent brand logo. Naturally, an art museum is uniquely well-positioned to give its packaged products this aura of fine arts.

Museum gift shops have long been an outlet for housewares with artistic aspirations. But museum beer was new to me. Will logo-suppressed “fast-moving-consumer-goods” be the wave of the future for museums and non-profits?

More about “museum beer” after the fold… [Read more…]

Matthew Brandt: Containers & “Can Scans”

Can-Scans-Container-Windex
Plastic Cleaner Magic 02, (a 2014 “Can Scan”); Container#5, (2014); Windex Scan 027, (2013)

Photographer, Matthew Brandt soaks his photos in an unorthodox chemistry. Because of this, his photographs carry certain challenges for art conservators.

The prints were thoroughly processed using all of the standard steps for chromogenic photographs and then were post-processed by immersion for varying amounts of time in water extracted from the body of water represented in the image. Soaking the print in water caused the partial destruction of the image layers, resulting in colorful abstractions of the original image.

Katherine Sanderson, Balancing Preservation Strategy & Artist Intent
Treatment of a Unique Chromogenic Print by Matthew Brandt

Best known for his Lakes and Reservoirs C-prints of bodies of water (mentioned above), Brandt also produced another body of work which garnered much less attention: photos of product containers and packaging.

He’s photographed Windex bottles, Comet cleanser cans, aerosol cans of Microwave Oven Magic & Plastic Cleaner Magic and a number of branded water bottles.

Usually he uses the contents of each container for the final “post-processing” step. Thereby showing us what happens when you apply household chemicals (instead of darkroom chemicals) to a photograph. (If lake water makes an art conservator’s job difficult, just imagine the archival impact of “oven cleaner” on a photo!)

No one has written much about these product photos. Hardly anything, in fact.

We pour over Brandt’s ‘product’ photos, after the fold… [Read more…]

3 More Mason Jar Stand-up Pouches

3-Mason-Jar-stand-up-pouchesLeft: Photo by Chris Rooney; center: from Boxes for Days; right: via Dave’s Sweet Tooth

Another round-up of “mason jar stand-up pouches”

I first noticed stand-up pouches shaped like old-fashioned canning jars in 2014. Then recently Chris Rooney tipped us off about some “snack size” produce being sold in mason jar stand-up pouches. This led me to check into it further. It turns out that, 4 years later, there are now some additional brands also doing the “jar bag” thing.

(More about each of the 3 examples, after the fold…) [Read more…]

Photogram Packaging: 3 photogrammatic packs

3-photogram-boxes photogram packaging

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress: Photogram Packaging.

…What do I mean by “photogram packaging?” I mean packaging that incorporates good old-fashioned cameraless photography.

László Moholy-Nagy and Alexey Brodovitch came to the United States in the 1930s. Both men were European designers. Each established himself at an art school — Moholy-Nagy at New Bauhaus in Chicago and Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School. Each gave classes in which they taught their students how to make photograms. Needless to say, they influenced a whole generation of designers.

Commercial Uses of Photograms

That photograms can be adapted to commercial use has been demonstrated in recent months though not to any notable extent.

The [photogram] work of Lester Beall has attracted considerable attention and will probably lead to a more cordial acceptance of the technic in advertising illustration, particularly for cosmetics and fashions. It should also prove effective eventually in package design.

Willard Detering Morgan, 1943
The Complete Photographer:
A Complete Guide to Amateur and Professional Photography

In the 40s and 50s, plenty of packaging pundits believed that “photogram packaging” was the wave of the future.  The future developed differently, however. Yes, there were some packages designed to include photograms. But it never really caught on. At least, not to any “notable extent.”

Alessi-PatternsI was reminded of photograms when I first started looking at Alessi’s early flatware packaging. Those boxes with their black & gray patterns of silhouetted cutlery looked like photograms to me. On closer inspection, however, they turned out not to be. Although, you could certainly say they were “photogrammatic.” (photogram-ish ?)

Similarly, I found many packages which included graphics with the silhouetted look of a photogram, but none of its shadowy, photographic shading.

I did, however, find a few notable examples where actual photograms actually appeared on packaging. (We look at 3 of them, after the fold…)

[Read more…]

Packaged (past tense): the Trump Vodka bottle

Trump-holding-trump-vodka-bottleWe interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this interview.

We’ve been hearing on the news about all of the failed products to which Trump has licensed his name. “Trump Vodka” was one of these products. It was Milton Glaser who, in 2006, designed its bottle.

Earlier this month, Mark Wilson spoke with with him about the bottle he designed for the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

Although Trump reportedly does not always pay his bills, Glaser did not have this problem. He says that Trump paid him in full and was easy to work with. None-the-less, it’s clear from his unsparing comments that he does not hold Donald J. Trump in high regard.

Glaser tells Wilson that he designed the golden Trump Vodka bottle to be “… appealing to the lowest level of human activity. Envy and status.”

Milton Glaser on: Donald Trump

It’s pretty unusual for a designer to bad-mouth a former client, especially one who Glaser says paid his bill.

It’s not the first time Glaser has been so frank about The Donald. He was similarly candid in a 2012 interview in NY Magazine…

What do you think of Donald Trump?

Well I’ve met him — I’ve even done a vodka bottle for him as a matter of fact. I don’t know how to think about him. He’s an example of the power of the ego. How can anyone be so totally egocentric to not understand that there are others in the universe. It also shows the power of that position: When you don’t think there are others, everything is attainable for you. I just find that the combination of incredible ambition and a lack of modesty can be a terrifying prospect. And if you’re in a roomful of people like that, you realize that that’s why the world is the way it is.

And the other thing is: I can’t figure out his hair. From the point of view of someone who is into art and form-making, I can’t figure out the structure of it: where it’s coming and where it’s going. And then I also wonder, what does he think this object on his head achieves? It’s just a great mystery.

Milton Glaser’s Hands Have Literally Never Touched a Keyboard
Vanita Salisbury, New York Magazine, April 20, 2012

Despite the top shelf design of the Trump Vodka bottle, the product was a failure.

[Read more…]

Advertising Photograms

W-Rich-Richter-1958 Advertising Photograms
Peter Keetman’s Advertsing photogram, made for a pharmaceutical company; W. Rich. Richter (1958) handled design

Advertising Photograms

I like Peter Keetman’s advertising photogram above. I like its silhouetted, nurdle-emitting tube of toothpaste. I like its background of gauze bandaging. I even like it as an artwork.

I do, however, question the efficacy of his photogram as an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company. They don’t name the specific pharmaceutical company. Were toothpaste and gauze bandaging an apt summation of their entire product line? I doubt it.

On the other hand, if this photogram really did appear in an advertisement, then maybe it contributed to a larger, more persuasive message. [If anyone has ever seen the ad, please let me know!]

What is an “advertising photogram” anyway? Why had I never heard the term before?

As it turns out, Photograms were widely touted in the 1940s for their commercial potential in advertising. Although occasionally deployed in advertising, “advertising photograms” never really caught on in a big way.

Moholy-Nagy-Goerz-photograms
Moholy-Nagy, 2 photograms used as posters for Goerz, 1925

Photograms not yet fully exploited

Paul Rand promoted the use of photograms in advertising his 1947 Thoughts on Design:

el-lissitzky-pelikan-tinte-1924The idea of the photogram or cameraless photography goes back as far as the 18th century… One of the first to apply this technique in advertising art was the constructivist, El Lissitzky, who, in 1924, designed a poster for Pelikan inks. [on right] …  In advertising, the photogram has yet to be fully exploited.

Although the effectiveness of the photogram depends chiefly on straightforward mechanical methods (light on sensitized paper), it offers the designer ample opportunity for esthetic, manual control. In a sense, it is not a picture of the object, but the object itself…

Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design, 1947

Of course, designers are unlikely to ever “fully exploit” advertising photograms now. How many photographers are equipped even to make photograms now that digital photography has made light-sensitive paper an obsolete medium?

But what if the history of advertising had gone differently? [Read more…]

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