The UPC is 35 today

On the morning of June 26, 1974 a UPC symbol, on the back of a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum, was scanned at a Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

Thus ushering in a technology that would change the face of retailing and make life forever more difficult for package designers. Today, according to a piece in the New York Times, bar codes are scanned 10 billion times a day around the world.

That was also a summer I remember well. I moved to New York and began my first job with George Lois and Clive Chajet, at the Lois Chajet Design Group. Clive would later go on to purchase Lippincott & Margulies, but that’s another story.

Art directors ruled. George’s office was half the 28th floor of 745 Fifth Avenue at 58th Street. An infamous space with a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window for the pocket door separating his office from the bar, and a marble pedestal desk overlooking 5th Avenue, Grand Army Plaza, and Central Park.

The other half of the floor he shared with just 4 other people, his assistant and his 3 art directors. Kurt Weihs, a quiet gracious holocaust survivor from Poland who had done some ground breaking work at CBS in the 1950s, including the design of the original CBS eye logo, when he worked there for William Golden. Dennis Mazella the surfer dude in love with franklin gothic, (who among other classics did the Maypo package shown at left from the 1969 AIGA archives) and Tom Courtos, a crazy Greek from Brooklyn, who went nuts with our first color copier.

Everybody else in the agency was on other floors. Amazing

And little did I know that the drafting table at my first job, on the 36th penthouse floor of the same building, again overlooking Central Park, would have the best view of my career. I can remember doing traditional mechanicals, at that desk, and trying to find space on the package for this strange new computer technology called UPC.

It was a great summer.

The package, as social media

One image of social business design from Dachis Group

In the old days a package was expected to do little more than sit nicely on the shelf and smile. We didn’t require much more than that.

Even today there are rarely expectations of a package being anything other than a well designed yet passive object in the final event of a well-choreographed series of brand decisions by the marketer and consumer. At best an attractive wall flower waiting to be asked to dance. Things are about to change.

There was much talk about structural uniqueness, cohesive brand identity, product benefits, appetite appeal, ease of use, color-coding, etc. But fundamentally the role of the package was protect the product and promote the brand. How very analogue. That wallflower is about to bloom in the social media world.

David Armano has an interesting piece on one future for social media. In it he talks about social media being much more than a few more channels, like corporate blogging for our eyes and ears. He begins to hint at something he calls Social Business Design by saying,

“Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line works etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We’re actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes “Web.2.0″ revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we’re calling it “social business design“. In its purest form, it’s a shift in thinking—less about media and more about tapping the benefits of being a social business in a purposeful way”

Now imagine a package, or even a brand for that matter, that is at its core “social, and through every part of its brand identity”, is connected.

What would that package be like as part of a very wide community?

First, it would step away from the wall and become part of the conversation. This would start with its immediate family. It would be tied into a network consisting of the entire retail manufacturing, distribution and retailing system.

There are some early examples of this with packages that carry RFID tags that track its manufacture, location, and identity in the retail process. I think this is just a start of that kind of conversation, a first step with a plugged in package.

Bruce Nussbaum talks about being connected as just the first step in his response to Armano’s column, “David argues that it is not sufficient for companies to merely plug into and participate in the social media of its customers. Companies must BECOME social media and be organized as social media.”

Secondly, after a package is plugged in and is part of the conversation, I would also argue that a package must become social media. And this also has begun to happen. I have spoken about some of this in earlier blogs, the Stone Buhr flour package that connects you to the farmer who grew the wheat, or doleorganic.com a web site where consumers can see and connect to banana farmers in Central America.

These are very early signs of the package becoming social media, and perhaps just tentative first steps for the package design industry, but we have been standing at the wall for a long time. Lets work together to help our clients, brands, and packages BECOME social media, not just plug in to the conversation.

Dummies for package design

Edward Rothstein/The New York Times

There was a piece in the New York Times over the weekend about two small museums that are repositories of nostalgic collections, one for ventriloquist dummies, and one for retail signs. It reminded me of the amazing resource the web has become for esoterica.

For those interested in package design there are some very interesting places to go. Here are just a few places I have uncovered that go beyond the popular beauty sites like dieline.com and lovelypackage.com.

The American Package Museum is curated by Ian House and has some interesting historical images of well-known brands.

For sites that focus on fruit crate art go to Paperstuff.com, oodlesalootle.com, and thelabelman.com.

To see how packaging is used in vintage advertising go to adclassix.com,

How about perfume bottles, try passionforperfume.com, or the Barcelona perfume museum.

There are sites for specific types of packaging like, collectiblesodacans.com, the soda can library, antiquebottles.com, historic glass bottles, rustycans.com, the beer can museum, capemaycountybottles.com, or milkbottlecollectors.com.

Enjoy old toys, try the classic toy museum, or tick tock toys,

For an incredible look at historic jazz album covers go to a Swedish site, birkajazz.com.

Some museums have interesting online collections from the well-known like the Cooper-Hewitt, to the well-hiden like the Hagley Museum’s on-line Raymond Loewy exhibit.

As I said this is just the beginning of what is available. Have fun!

Thinking outside the boxed wine

Boxed wine has historically had a bad rap. But better product and better packaging may be changing that perception. Packaging Digest has a recent post written by David Belim that discusses new products that will certainly lift the perception of boxed wine, for two reasons. The quality is improving and the box structure seems to have some environmental advantages over the bottle.

This article features two wines, dtour Macon Villages and Bota Box. Two very different concepts in boxed wine.

Dtour is a collaboration of Dominque Lafon, Daniel Boulud, and Daniel Johnnes, a wine-maker, a chef, and a sommelier, and each very highly respected in their fields. In fact Robert Parker reviewed the 2004 vintage and said the wine was “a refreshing non-oaked vibrant and tasty 100% chardonnay and very authentic Macon. All three men are at the tops of their respective professions  .  .  so I wasn’t surprised by how good this light to medium-bodied relatively modest alcohol(13%) wine has turned out”.

The other wine is Bota Box, a wine that has recently changed its packaging to be much more environmentally friendly. Their web site boasts that boxed wine uses “85% less landfill waste than traditional glass packages and has a smaller carbon footprint as well.” They also claim the box is made from 100% post-consumer fiber, is recyclable, and uses soy based inks.

Boxed wine also has a new web site, aboutboxedwine.com

It looks like the producers of boxed wine are beginning to realize that as the quality of their product increases they may need to boost the overall quality of their brand identity as well. It should be interesting to watch this product category in the next few years.

I suspect we will see an interesting design evolution that could mirror the increasing sophistication exhibited in the last few years by the ready-to-drink wine and spirits market.

Crowdsourced Creativity, continued

I posted some thoughts about crowd sourced creativity on April 10th, and mentioned all of the reasons why I thought it was a bad, no a really bad, trend for both designers and clients. But it keeps cropping up in the press.

In fact there is an article in Business Week online this week by John Winsor of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky.

I can’t help but wonder where this is taking the design industry. We seem to be entering a period where the traditions of the design marketplace are, at a minimum, being redefined around the edges.

But we may be facing much more. Look at how the music industry has already been revolutionized by iTunes, book publishing is in the midst of being altered by Kindle, traditional newspapers are quickly becoming print dinosaurs, operating systems like Linux and others are free and open source. 

Yet you have most thoughtful members of our industry, like the AIGA, arguing that work on spec is a bad bad thing.

As John Winsor says at the end of his article, “The question for creative agencies is whether they can wake up, react to what’s going on, engage the crowd, and make themselves a part of the new reality.”

But it seems to me that perhaps the definition of a creative agency, a traditional place of collective thought, developing consistently great work for clients, may be at risk. There must be lessons from musicians, writers, newspapers, record labels, book publishers, etc. that we need to learn, and fast.

Pixar’s tens of thousands of ideas

Just finished an amazing piece, in the Harvard Business Review written by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar, on managing collective creativity. It is one of the most intelligent, rigorous, yet straightforward summations of how great ideas come out of large organizations. Like most things that come from Pixar, the piece is magic! 

Its impossible to summarize in this blog the numorous insights he brings together, but here are my thoughts on a few.

Creativity is not a mysterious solo act.

As he says, ”A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

I love this image of a movie being the product of thousands of individual creative ideas, all feeding on each other. Any creative endeavor is a process of constant growth, one idea after another, with new ideas building on top of the previous thought.

Also, package design, and most industries that rely on creativity, are often identified with two stereotypical types of creative processes, either the brilliant loner (Karim Rashid), or the global creative juggernaut (Landor). His point is that at Pixar, they have found a way of defining creativity as neither a mysterious solo act or the product of a faceless worldwide organization.

Smart people are more important than good ideas

This may seem antithetical to many designers, but his point is that smart people are by nature incredibly creative. He uses an example of the struggles they had with Toy Story 2, and as he concludes “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”

Power to the creatives

This may seem obvious, as we all know, but all too often the wrong people are charged with making creative decisions in large organizations.

As he says, “Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone.”

Support a culture of peers not competitors

Again, perhaps self evident, but part of the problem with too many creative organizations is the fostering of a competitive “ownership” culture, where ideas are protected and individual ownership of ideas is rewarded. I wonder if the sense of “healthy competition” starts in design school with students competing against each other while developing independent portfolios. Perhaps another blog entry.

Again he says, “Of great importance—and something that sets us apart from other studios—is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all.”

These are just a few of the key points he makes in the piece. Subscribe to HBR. For anyone responsible for managing creativity, this article alone is worth the price. But there are many others.

References

Catmull, Ed. 2008. How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Harvard Business Review. September 2008.

Peter Max, paleoartists, and package design

I got an acetylene torch for my high school graduation present, and went off to art school intending to become the next David Smith or Richard Serra.

Then I met Peter Max. 

Viktor Deak's Hominids with Peter Max

I had always enjoyed the 3 dimensional quality and the structural solidity of the metal sculpture I was doing at the time. But naturally as a young art student had a very naive sense of how art was created, marketed, and sold. One of my jobs while at school was working for a Philadelphia art gallery, and it quickly taught me the commercial and political side of the art world. And Peter Max, who exhibited at the gallery at the time, was a cynical master of both. Without going into the details, he almost single handedly turned me off to the notion of becoming a sculptor.

As an aside I went to a Yankees game recently and saw that Peter Max is the “official” artist of the new stadium, with a big gallery space on the main concession level  .  .  .  almost enough to make me a Red Sox fan. 

Now I say almost single handedly turned me off to being a sculptor, because by this point I had already begun to fall for the irresistible charms of typography, logotypes, photography, illustration and the wonderful way the best package designers combine them into their own 3 dimensional, yes even sculptural objects. Package design seemed like a great way to combine my new interests in graphic design with my continued interest in creating 3-dimensional objects.

A piece in the NY Times, on the paleoartist Viktor Deak, caught may attention. Like me, he has found a way of combining two interests into a career. In his case paleontology and sculpture, in my case graphic design and sculpture. Working from the inside out, he creates sculptural images of humans and other animals for places like the American Museum of Natural History, from the bones and fossils given to him by paleontologists.

It might be a stretch, but package designers and paleoartists are working in much the same way, just with way different materials.

He starts with the bones and a set of theoretical information given to him by scientists and gradually builds the 3-dimensional image of an early hominid. We start with the same kind of limited information, build on the history of the product given to us by the marketers, and then gradually design a package that is our best representation of the brand.  

Two fascinating combinations of science and art.

Acknowledgements

The image above combines the work of Viktor Deak, from an exhibit showing how reconstructions are made, at the American Museum of Natural History, with Peter Max. Apologies to Viktor Deak.

Work on spec, just say no!

The design community seems to be getting increasingly vocal in its opposition to work on spec, and it is none too soon.

The internet, as it has the potential to do with most things, may turn the traditions of design procurement on its head. It is an increasingly complicated world, made even more complicated by the financial crisis. But I hope, that we as a community, can try to stem the erosion of value that spec work represents.

In order to give a diverse range of views I offer three perspectives that have very reasoned and thoughtful positions in opposition of work on spec; 1. The AIGA, the largest professional association of designers in the world, 2. Debbie Millman, its new President, and 3. a great website devoted to opposing work on spec.,  www.no-spec.com 

The AIGA introduced in May its newly revised guidelines on spec work. Richard Grefé, the Executive Director writes in his introduction to these new guidelines, “AIGA acknowledges that spec work has long been practiced, continues to occur and may indeed be increasing, particularly as the internet alters and augments solicitation, bidding, marketing and distribution practices.” I encourage you to review the resources available on the AIGA site, including a sample letter that can be used to respond to requests for work on spec. 

Debbie Millman, the new President of the AIGA, has been working hard to discourage the practice, and has a great post on her blog, called spec this, outlining the simple reasons, using a heartfelt personal example, why we should resist the temptation.

Lastly, www.no-spec.com, is perhaps the best on-line resource for information on the movement.

The issue of work on spec has been with us for ages. But the combined forces of a tough economy, a new worldwide design marketplace made possible by the internet, no clear standards for design procurement, a lack of established global guidelines on ownership and use of design, and the temptations brought on by unscrupulous or simply naive businesses, are all conspiring to radically alter the value of our time, talent and creativity.

If you are a young designer, resist the temptation to build your portfolio with work done for free.

If you are an independent designer, resist the temptation to contribute to one of the new on-line crowd sourced design resources. The chances of getting any compensation for your work on these sites is slightly above the odds of winning the lottery.

If you own a small design firm, resist the temptation from the very cool new client who says they will make it up to you next time.

If you manage the design division of a global agency, resist the request from your management, that we know you are getting more often, to throw in some design work as part of your agency’s overall multi-faceted strategic pitch.

Just resist! 

As Debbie Millman says beautifully at the end of her blog comments on spec work,

“Speculative work denigrates both the agencies and the designers that participate. If we give away our work for free, if we give away our talent and our expertise, we give away more than the work. We give away our hearts for free, and we give away our souls.

Who writes cultural history

There is an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times, by Holland Cotter. It asks, through a review of two art exhibitions now in New York, who has the right to define cultural history and enshrine the cultural icons of a certain time. The beginning of the piece frames the primary question he poses throughout the article,

“HOW does cultural history get written? Who chooses which portraits will hang in the hall of fame, which art will live on in museums, which books will end up on the classics shelf, which music will be standard fare in tomorrow’s concert halls?

We are encouraged to think that such judgments have lives of their own, are decided by a kind of natural selection. The most beautiful art will prevail, the most ambitious, the most morally uplifting, the most universal in emotional appeal. Everything else is by default of a lesser order. We shouldn’t fret if it disappears.

This view is, of course, wishful thinking.”

The article continues to review the two shows that are defined by certain periods of time or a certain generation of artists. Cotter wonders throughout about the various selections made for these shows, not just who is included but who has been left out. As he says,

“Such revisionism is, perhaps, a curator’s privilege but not a historian’s.” 

This made me wonder about my own version of package design history, and its accuracy/relevance/objectivity/etc.

This blog is in the midst of reviewing 20th century package design history. The design review has gotten to roughly 1940, and as we get closer to the present it is becoming increasingly clear that the selections we make and the demonstrations we use will become more subjective. This is “a” package design history, and certainly not “the” package design history. 

In part, the difficulty in selecting influential work as we get closer to the present, is because the historical record is more complete and therefore the options are larger. But there is another concern. How do I deal with my subjective opinion of one designer’s influence vs. another?

Perhaps that is simply the prerogative of blogging, you make the house rules. And perhaps the decisions I make will become increasingly curatorial and less strictly historical. But having lived through, and personally known many of the influential designers of the last half of the 20th century, its going to get personal.

Acknowledgements

The image above is “Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates,” 1982-84, by Allan McCollum, on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.”