reactions

Having a cold in the summer should be a crime, however seasonal allergies get the best of everyone and if you’ve got to curl up with a tissue box this June, I highly reccomend the new “Perfect Slice of Summer” Kleenex packaging for Target, illustrated by Hiroko Sanders. Talk about an affordable luxury, nothing brightens my day more than a fruity, clever, and beautiful Kleenex box.  I even love the dynamic shape, blended perfectly with the visual. Especially when my alternative options are packaged in blue grey swirls and “cottony soft” patterns. Egad! I personally hate tissues boxes so much we are toilet paper only household, but I will buy these—simply for the packaging.

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I realize that picking on Tropicana’s ill-fated new branding has become as common as picking on AIG’s improperly compensated managers. However, I’m choosing to lambaste Tropicana here not because of aesthetics, but because of their incredibly poor and inconsistent graphic system.

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A few weeks ago, Tropicana announced that they are pulling their controversial new packaging that hit the stores earlier this year. When we first saw the redesign, we had the same reaction much of the public did: yikes. The rebranding seemed to strip Tropicana from its identity and positioning in the market and leave us with a product that felt very generic, lacking an emotional connection.

As a designer, I’m interested in how the brand ended up in this spot. I stumbled across a video of Creative Director Peter Arnell, from the Arnell Group, defending his design to the press. In my opinion, he gets a bit too cerebral about what the design elements represent and loses site of the big picture (a very common design error). Click here to see how he defends his design (a.k.a. a designer’s worst nightmare).
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Let’s be honest, the Japanese are geniuses with wacky innovations. I would be remiss if I didn’t share any of the crazy innovations Marc and I saw on our recent journey to Japan.

Let’s start with their innovations with the QR bar code. Designed to be  read quickly, these codes are now used everywhere from billboards to advertisements. You take a photo of one with your cell phone’s camera and then present that image at the store to be scanned as a coupon or as a ticket. Here’s a billboard in Tokyo that, when you take a photo, loads a special website on your phone.

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There’s probably a very good reason why the Japanese are light-years ahead of the rest of us when it comes to cutting-edge graphics, although it’s not my job to speculate. Instead, I simply marveled at it all as I had the opportunity to wander the streets.

MSLK’s recent trip to Japan found us taking picture after picture of cool trends, colors, shapes, and patterns. These are things you needn’t go to a gallery or museum to see, either — they’re all around you — in subways, on buses, on sale in convenience stores, and all over the street.

Click below for some of our favorites…

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It is with a tremendous amount of love that I write this post, having just returned from one of the most eye-opening (if not wallet-opening) trips in my life: a trip to Japan with Sheri.

We had an amazing time visiting shrines, temples, museums, and sampling the cultural riches from the streets of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya to small towns such as Kasugai and Owariashi.

I will leave Sheri’s more pragmatic nature to post things from the “high” road, and will walk you through some of the offbeat things which caught our eye from a decidedly “lower” road.

Hope you enjoy…

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I know, I know… the only thing designers complain about more than corporate branding is corporate branding redesign. Both Pepsi and Tropicana unveiled new brand designs in the past few weeks. From the looks of it, the marketing department finally decided to modernize the brands, as designers across the world had hoped for years. Yes, we had been begging them to control all the starbursts, call-outs, dropshadows, glow effects, and whiz-bangs in their packaging. We had hoped for a controlled color palette and streamlined information. From the looks of it, they really did remove everything – including the spirit of the brands.

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On a recent trip to Whole Foods, something caught our eye that was so incredibly simple, so obvious, that it made us wonder why it hasn’t always been this way: A biodegradable flowerpot.

Instead of buying flowers in the standard plastic pot which you inevitably dispose of after transplanting the plant into your garden, this eco-friendly, unbelievably easy solution literally embodies the concept of sustainable design, the pot returns to soil itself. No mess, no fuss. Just dig a hole, and set it in. Even the tag is biodegradable making doing good practically effortless.

If you want to keep these on your stoop, that’s fine, too. In most cases, the pot will outlast the flowers. Once you’re done, simply put whole thing into your compost bin.

Why isn’t everything designed this way?

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Recently at the HBA Expo, I attended a lecture by Jane Bickerstaffe, the director of INCPEN, the Industry Council for Packaging & the Environment. When discussing innovation in sustainable packaging, one can usually expect to hear the same topics covered, reduction of the packaging weight/thickness, use of recycled or bio materials, reduction of overall packaging components. However, Jane wanted to point out something entirely new. The carbon footprint of the packaging of a product is really just one tiny spec in the overall life cycle and eco-footprint of the product it contains. In short, packaging protects far more resources than it expends by proportion. So if you reduced the thickness of your packaging and the product inside became damaged as a result, the amount you sought to save would be wasted by 10 or 20 fold.

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I’m noticing a thread of drug inspired Chocolate packaging out there. Bochox by Bloomsberry & Co. and then last night, a chocolate syringe at Max Brenner. The syringe is totally over the top, you actually squirt the liquid chocolate into your mouth. It was, however, pretty tasty. If you come across a chocolate ‘fix’ send a pic of it my way, let’s see how many we can collect.