Packaging

Before Punk and later Steampunk there was Erector punk. Well, it wasn't called that. Yet there were punk kids who loved toying with Erector sets. The kid above is the personification of joyful madness that many Erectorphiles experienced. Erector, invented by A.C. Gilbert and director of the eponymous Hall of Science on 5th Avenue and [...]

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Lavish graphic design histories are emerging all over the world. The latest to crop up is Linha do tempo do design gráfico no Brasil, written by Chico Homem de Melo and edited and designed by Elaine Ramos, the art director of Editora Cosacnaify, (with a preface by me). This is an ambitious in depth history [...]

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With 22 years in the industry, no one has inspired my generation to bridge the gap between design and illustration more than Paul Sahre. His second floor studio above a Dunkin' Donuts on 6th Avenue (see his brilliant business card in a previous post of mine), has been a safe house for interns, students, old [...]

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The Bruce Lee craze of the 1970s produced an endless array of merchandise in the hopes of cashing in on the world-renowned martial artist’s popularity – especially after his untimely death in 1973 at the age of 32. I'd been a fan of his since he'd played "Kato" in the old "Green Hornet" TV series, [...]

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Advertising designers seem to have had a lot more license to play like children back in the 1920s. These Belgian posters for the Union match manufacturer, show metamorphic matches at their finest and most absurd. The concept of creating flighty trade characters were possible inspired by Renaissance gargoyles, though twice as absurd. Trade characters were [...]

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Last month, Copenhagen-based graphic design studio Hvass&Hannibal released the DVD packaging for An Island, a 50-minute music documentary by French filmmaker Vincent Moon about Danish indie band, Efterklang. Designer Nan Na Hvass and her husband, band member Rasmus Stolberg, spent three months living in Portland, Oregon, where they came across Stumptown Printers. The outer covers [...]

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In the book Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic captures the essence of artist Joseph Cornell in verse like a close encounter of the third kind. Several weeks ago, I was lucky enough to catch three Eastern European poets duke it out over the merits of Polish writer, translator and poet Czesław Miłosz. The line up was [...]

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The Lenin Tribune designed by El Lissitzky from 1920-1924 is an oft rebuilt icon of Modern "graphic" Constructivist architecture.  In 1984 (a fitting Orwellian year for celebrating utopia) Paul Groenendijk and Piet Vollaard issued a set of five avant garde architectural cut-out and paste-up models, of which the Tribune was one. They are now quite [...]

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The 2012 Fiat 500 is cute, but doesn't hold a spark to the 500s of old. The new Fiat is compact, like a Mini and rotund like a VW, but the original doesn't compare to the stubby little Fiat L. Take this Fiat Cinquecento, for instance, it was imported from Italia - so small it [...]

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Product packaging spotted at the Wumart (I kid you not) in Beijing. Are these REAL Pepsi briefs, or is this the ultimate in knockoffs? I asked Lisa Francella, senior director of Visual Identity and Branding Extension at Pepsico, Inc., in Purchase, New York. “I know this is not a package that I approved!” was her [...]

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