Hasta La Ideas

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pIt’s a pity that photos aren’t edible, because Andrew Gibbs’s a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Box-Bottle-Bag-Package-TheDieline-com/dp/1600614191/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1277337592sr=1-1/?tag=core77-20″emBox, Bottle, Bag/em/a contains a lot of tasty looking packaging, which unfortunately contain soap as often as food. Taking the best designs from his website the a href=”http://www.thedieline.com/”emThe Dieline/em/a, Gibbs has produced a lovingly photographed book of packaging accompanied with copy about the agency that designed it, often including quotes about the project. Although it’s broken ito six chapters, including Luxe, Bold, Crisp, Charming, Casual and Nostalgic, frankly, it’s all pretty luxurious (even “Ugly Mug Coffee”). Instead, those categories serve to denote which cultural signifiers the designers wanted for their products. With the printed word harking back to Guttenberg and the development of script reaching even further into history, modern day graphic and package designers have an broad and deep lineage of visual forms to chose from./p

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pEvery font sends a message about the product’s “style,” and by proxy the style and persona of the buyer. The chapter that’s called nostalgia, for example, includes visual references to the turn of the (20th) century, allusions to the Vargas girls festooned to the sides of WWII bombers and toys appropriate for the children of the men who fought in that war. To the modern buyer, wearing their pseudo-ironic Buddy Holly glasses, the whole of the 20th century can be appropriated as nostalgia. Designers now have computer tools robust enough to create virtually any visual impression, and they get to sell that to an audience raised in a media saturated environment that prepared them for all of those cues. In short, it’s a pretty good time to be a packaging designer, and the variety and contrast of the products shown in emBox, Bottle, Bag/em make a strong case that today’s packaging designers can do more with a computer, a color printer, and the eponymous die cutting machine than their forebearers could ever do by hand. Left unanswered is whether being able to produce endless objects that look “luxe” and individualized is a good thing, when the products contained within often lack the loving care that their shiny outsides advertise./p

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