Sadly, VHS box design never reached the heights achieved by audio cassettes, but looking back they weren’t as bad as I remembered. This set comes courtesy of Hauk Sven
Via Flyer Goodness
Mehmet Gozetlik decided to explore what would happen if he stripped down the packaging of iconic brands to the bare minimum. The results are fantastic and represent the kind of branding that always pulls me in. I’d love to see a real-world study on how effective these “minimal-ized” were on the general public (not just designers). Do you think they would do better?
My personal favorite results here have to be Jelly Belly, Nutella, and Guinness.
The Dieline via Jeff Toll
Some excellent examples from Graphis Packaging 3. I can say without any doubt in my mind, that packaging design has declined significantly over the past 20 years. Take a look at the more recent Graphis Packaging 9. Nothing in there even remotely piques my interest. I would love to hear a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon. Is it that marketing departments have slowly wrested control from true designers? Or is it just that I personally appreciate the style of a specific era to the current one? Or maybe I’m just so used to the style of things today that I am intrigued by the rarefied forms of the past. I’d like to think I’m being objective about the whole thing and that the above examples really are superior, but perhaps I’m not.
Anyone in the know care to shed some light on this? Have studies been done? I need answers!! I’ll tell you one thing, you could fill those boxes with whatever you wanted; if I saw them on the shelf I would buy them. Check out some more examples here.
Images via Crabstick
The always excellent Watsonian — who also brought you the Super 8 packaging — have posted these beautiful examples of vintage Kodak film packaging. Every time I see something like this the first thing that pops into my head is “Why doesn’t more commercial packaging look like this anymore?”. I then tell myself “If more commercial packaging looked like this you wouldn’t find it as interesting.” I think that point could be argued but you can’t argue that strictly from a design standpoint, these are just plain better than this crap.
I guess the next question though is whether some kid in 30 years will think the more recent example is better, but I seriously doubt it. I really feel like more attention was paid to the quality of design before the age of computers, I guess the practitioners were just more skilled given the level of training required. Now it’s “have Photoshop will travel”, which obviously cuts both ways. What do you think?
Via The Watsonian (who is apparently a cat)
