BEACH

Branding & Package Design

Droste Effect Packaging

Landolakes2
At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals.

This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.

Droste-Royal
Left: the front panel of Cocao package for which the “Droste effect” is named. Right: An old Royal Baking Powder package which also illustrates the effect.

Since so many products are nearly indistinguishable from their packaging—(a tube of ChapStick, a can of Coke)—I figured that there would be lots of examples. My brief supermarket survey showed me otherwise. It’s quite rare. You can easily find packaging that includes packaging pictures, but it’s almost always a picture of the inner packaging—(the outside of the box shows the packets contained within)—or else it’s a cross-marketing campaign where pictures of other packages in the product line are shown—usually on the back.

(more photos after the jump) 

MortonSalt-Detail
CrackerJack
 The Droste effect seems to be most applicable to packaging with illustrations. For those products that include an illustrated mascot, it would seem a natural thing to have the mascot holding the product package. Tony-the-Tiger holding up a box of Frosted Flakes. The Planter Peanut fellow offering us peanuts from a jar or a can. Why aren’t the mascots doing this? The reasons are perhaps understandable. Better to emphasize the consumer’s end use of the product or to convey the purity of the ingredients. (Rather than to make their packaging into recursive ads-within-ads.) Hence: a bowl of frosted cornflakes ready to eat; mixed nuts offered to guests, not from the can, but from an elegant serving dish.

And yet, a lot of products are being consumed directly from their single-serving packages. Why not a bottle of Coke with the polar bear holding a bottle of Coke? There must be few more examples of Droste effect packaging out there to add to this skimpy catalog… Anyone?

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Update: since writing this post back in 2008, I’ve disovered a number of other examples and have added a Droste effect category to box vox.

Comments

  4. The worst kind of Droste effect is in Halloween costumes. I was Darth Vader one year and that costume had a fairly decent mask, a light saber, and a cape, but the costume itself featured an illustration of Darth Vader holding a light saber. Since when does Darth Vader have a picture of himself on his own chest? I thought that was stupid when I was 9 and I haven’t changed my mind.

    Reply

  12. Moirs Pot of Gold chocolate did use this method years ago but I’m not sure that they do now. i was fascinated by it as a child 50 years ago.

    Reply

  14. Uncle Ben’s Rice used to have a picture of a box of Uncle Ben’s Rice on it.
    ChuckyG: Damn you. I had survived 10 years of trauma after seeing “Mouse and His Child.” Now I won’t sleep until 2009.

    Reply

  17. I think French chocolate milk brand ‘Banania’ used to have a guy holding a can of the stuff on the can until a few years ago, good post though, quite intriguing!

    Reply

  25. britta, droste does actually still sell those tins and is still using the same imagery in their regular packaging (never change recognizable packaging) in the netherlands (and you can find it pretty much all over the place online as well).
    funnily enough in the nineties droste used the term “droste effect” for the effect their chocolate had on you. i vaguely recall a small scandal because the adds were slightly naughty, with people trying to suck droste pastilles out of other people’s mouths…
    http://www.droste.nl/data/content/engels/index.php

    Reply

  28. Thanks Randy Ludacer, I came to this article because I was instantly reminded of that cartoon I watched as a child, but there was no way I would ever remember the name. Thanks again.

    Reply

  29. Dunkin Donuts also has this effect. Their coffee cups feature the logo which itself features a coffee cup bearing the Dunkin Donuts logo.

    Reply

  30. mieke: Oh, cool! I also remembered that old Quaker Oats boxes used to have something like this, and I can find plenty of confirmation (search for “quaker oats recursion”) but I can’t find any actual images of that version of the box.

    Reply

  31. When I was a boy, I would stare at the Land O’Lakes butter packaging for hours, amazed by the “infinite loop” of Indian maidens. I’m pleasantly surprised to find out I’m not the only one who’s ever gave this any real thought.

    Reply

  32. “Camp” coffee & chicory essence mixture comes in a bottle with a label showing a manservant holding a tray with a bottle of “Camp” coffee & chicory essence mixture with a label showing a manservant holding a tray….
    (I don’t know if it’s available in USA.)

    Reply

  36. One of the more interesting droste effect was a film about the Dubonnet aperitive wine. In this film of the 60′,the classical Dubonnet bottle, featuring a cat around the Dubonnet bottle…etc, was the subject of a train going through the infinite image. The sound was like the sound of a train saying DUBO, DUBON, DUBONNET…DUBO, DUBON, DUBONNET….To explain this you have to remember that in the Paris metro….this was written on the walls of the tunnels with BIG letters. Everybody in the 50′ was obsessed with DUBO..DUBON…DUBONNET which by the way, sound for the french like the beautiful, the good Dubonnet.
    The question of the “Laughing Cow”, la “Vache qui rit” in french, is even more interesting. Tis was the image of infinity..and some king of holliness for many french children like me. The “Vache qui rit” cheese is made by the famous “fromagerie BEL” And suprinsingly if you read the famous historian of religions Mircea Eliade, you learn that the prefix BEL is attached to many kind of sacred cows. Everybody knows the god Baal, the demon Belzebuth, etc. In french, the lady cow of Walt Disney is named ClaraBelle Bellecorne with a double Bel…This to say that maybe…some secret society worshipping these old gods uses strange tricks in ads…only in the opinions of the adept of a “theory of subversion” obviuously…..

    Reply

  37. Slightly off, but related – the standard ketchup bottle in diners back in the 50’s and 60’s had a picture of a waitress carrying a tray, and on the tray was a bottle of ketchup showing a waitress with a tray, and on the tray… The recursion used to fascinate me when I was a kid.

    Reply

  40. I remember the Camp Coffee mentioned by John Lindsay, and the bottle was definitely a Droste in my youth. However, the packageing has now been changed so that the Indian is no longer the servant of the Highlander, so the bottle (and Droste) has gone. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=404516&in_page_id=1770&ct=5
    gives long before and after (click on image); but the 50’s version was colored and the two figures could be clearly distinguished on the “inner” bottle. Thsi http://www.plattsminipackages.co.uk/…/campcoffee.gif shows the bottle as I remember it, with the inner bottle just visible; in our storecupboard, the inner bottled looked like the outer here.

    Reply

  41. This effect has been done on magazine and comic book covers, where collectors and price guides refer to it as an “Infinity cover”. I can recall an issue of Dynamite magazine from the 1970s that was like that.

    Reply

  42. Not identical…
    The Dallas Morning News ran a TV ad campaign in which the people in the ad were reading the paper, and the people in the paper were “real” in the next scene reading the paper, and the people in the paper in that scene were “real” in the next scene and so on and so on and so. I tried to find a link to the ad, without success.

    Reply

  45. its is really strane to see how our daily life prodcucts will look without this packaging.
    Iknow in my heart thet all brands r the same, but i dont know why i ale=ways pick up the most attractive one all the time

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Read previous post:
Packaging Goodness

Can package design ever really be good?—not “good” in the sense of being a good design, but “good” in the...

Close