Like any product, the packaging can be just as important in getting a sale as the content inside it.  Alcohol packaging seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to applying a creative twist.  Check out a short list I’ve put together of some of the world’s most creative vodka bottle designs.

Double Cross Vodka

Tentation Vodka

1000 Acres Vodkas

Damskya Vodka

360 Vodka

U’luvka Vodka

Crystal Head Vodka

Karlsson’s Vodka

Roaring 20’s Tommy Gun Vodka

Waitrose Vodkas

Vertikal Vodka

Samurai Vodka

Oval Vodka

Bong Vodkas

Scorpion Vodka by Edible

Awesome.

-Bendey

Pour continuer notre série sur les vodkas premium et leurs packagings, je voudrais vous présenter ce soir la vodka 1 000 acres.

Arnell, célébre designer, nous prouve au travers de ces cinq bouteilles que le design verrier n’a (presque) aucune limite.
La vodka 1 000 acres se pare ainsi de cinq design originaux qui élèvent ce produit au rang d’œuvre d’art.

Je me pose toutefois la question de la facilité à verser le produit dans un verre ! J’aimerais avoir une démonstration pour vérifier qu’on ne perd aucune goutte du précieux brevage !

En tout cas, il est sûr que ces packagings sur une étagère sont du plus bel effet…

1000 acres vodka by Arnell

Présentation d’Arnell.

Créée en 1979 par Peter Arnell, l’agence acquière rapidement une renommée internationale tant ses compétences en design et création de marque sont développées. Son expertise s’exerce dans le produit, le design industriel, graphique, packaging, la création d’identité, la publicité et les nouveaux medias.
Vous pouvez découvrir le site Internet par ici : http://arnell.com/

Okay, once more this post isn’t about booze, and it is a stretch to say it is about packaging, but Cranky cannot resist commenting. It is tough being this cranky!

The internet dinosaur, AOL, is attempting to make itself relevant again (as if it ever really was) by repackaging itself. So far this effort appears to be only a new logo design (if you can call it a logo much less design). Rebranding, or repackaging to maintain the blog’s theme, involves more than just icons, and it isn’t clear if AOL, which is shedding employees like snakes shed skin, is doing any of the other things needed to succeed in the 21^st century – like maybe, have a vision?  But this post will limit itself to the alleged design of the alleged logo, which was allegedly done by Wolff Olins, an alleged global brand and innovation consultancy. Allegedly!

AOL is now referring to themselves as “Aol.”, whatever that means. Yes, that is a cap “A”, lower case “o” and “l”, followed by a period. The period has some esoteric symbolism that the consumer is supposed to have an “Ah-ha!” moment over but rarely ever does.

Does the cap “A”, which is “America” in the name, mean they are now REALLY Americans and less “on line”, which is what the “o” and the “l” represents? Still not sure what the period stands for. They claim it means “completeness”, but Cranky is thinking – maybe “finished” as in “toast”?

Aside from the “clever” use of caps and lower case letters, and of course the period, this logo has another unusual feature – it changes. The logo is to be used in different visual contexts. That is indeed a clever concept (Cranky did a logo like that 30 years ago.), but the application doesn’t seem to be working here, and the reason seems to be the strange images chosen as the context.

“The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL.

Sounds like a load of bravo sierra to Cranky. In fact when Cranky was young this hand sign meant just that.

They claim the full logo will be revealed on December 10 when AOL common stock begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange. We can only hope things get better, because what Cranky sees so far is pretty lame.

Guest blogger: Eileen Burick from Burick Communications Design.

On occasion, I invite guest bloggers to share a subject they have expertise in.  Eileen Burick and her husband Bob are the dynamic duo for high-end visual communications, print and web, and I value  their insight and expertise.  We spoke about the shift away from good original design focus to templates and what it means.  Here is her blog on the subject to help the CMO’s and Marketing Directors across the country bring focus in this area with their agencies and teams.

Design Matters

While there is understandably much focus on Search Engine Optimization, when a web viewer is delivered from a link they’ve found on organic, paid or linked search to their desired destination — even if the content is high quality — and the resulting web site’s visual presentation is average, cluttered or unprofessionally executed and the viewer has to work too hard to find the information they are searching for, the page view has a high likely hood of being quickly abandoned.

Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second).* If the look and feel of a site doesn’t deliver on the brand promise, conversions are lost. SEO functions like the yellow pages which may get a viewer to the landing page but if expectations are unmet because of poor visual impact, the SEO effort loses its effectiveness.
If image is important then SEO alone is not enough to propel sales. Employing a basket of visually distinctive technologies and tactics with multiple touch-points and telling a relevant “story” as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, will over the long-term prove most effective.
There is so much competition among Web sites that in order to truly “stand out from the crowd” it is critical that all three components — search optimization, quality content and effective, aesthetically pleasing visual impact — be addressed and developed with maximum care.

User Interface (UI) Designer, Hitesh Puri writes that “Attractive things work better.” The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a “skin” that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view. Those user judgments begin within 50 milliseconds of seeing the first page of your site.

Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs. Douglas Bowman’s recent experience as a graphic designer among Google’s engineers who want “data” behind every aesthetic decision is instructive: data and user feedback are always important components of good design, but they are never its sole ingredients.”

The Stanford Web Credibility Project (http://credibility.stanford.edu/) found that “…nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

Participants seemed to make their credibility-based decisions about the people or organization behind the site based upon the site’s overall visual appeal.”

As search commoditizes its results the way to differentiate a company or a brand is through design. When there are so many template, “me-too” sites competing for attention, defining a unique ambiance and “voice” is critical to conversion.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson describes it this way: “Ambience is defined as “a feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing. Atmosphere. Web developers call it ‘look-and-feel.’ Though it’s hard to define, you know it when you see it. In a website, ambience is produced by a pleasing combination of logo, style, layout, typography, white space, color, types of photos used, and the “voice” of the copy. All these and more define the business’s “brand.”

You can learn a great deal about a business in the first five seconds that you’re on its site. Is it older and conservative, or young and edgy? Is it “all business” or is there fun peeking around the corner? Is it rather pompous and self-possessed, or does it seem care about the customer? At first glance, does it look like it can meet your need, or not? Is it bland and faceless, or does it have personality?

I hope that you now understand the difference between a standard template business site and a custom approach that communicates your business personality in a memorable way. While you can communicate your unique voice in a bland site, you won’t be visually memorable.”

So, to be memorable and to drive results, consider the relevance and effectiveness of design.
Tiny URL:  http://tinyurl.com/ybxaxw6

*  http://hiteshpuri.blogspot.com/2009/11/visual-decision-making.html?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=open&toggle=MONTHLY-1254335400000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1257013800000

Eileen Burick, President, Burick Communication Design
eileen@burick.com  602-866-3305 
Please visit  http://www.burick.com/briefcase_henkel/
HIGH-END MARKETING COLLATERAL MATERIALS  |  VISUALLY DISTINCTIVE DESIGN FOR THE WEB

cliente        estudio danimelo.biz

tipología    packaging arroz ecológico

material     cartoncillo

“… una de las novedades más interesantes que introduce este packaging es que contiene todo lo necesario para cocinar y servir cuatro raciones de arroz al mas puro estilo japonés; 4 raciones arroz  ecológico, tofu japonés, salsa de soja, cuatro platos de porcelana e incluso cuatro juegos de palillos… todo ello en un formato compacto y con una estética muy contemporánea …”

cliente        ADAEQUO

tipología    “Silver Nature” de Armand Basi 2008

material     cartón+folding+plástico

cliente        ADAEQUO

tipología    estudio tipologías de expositores para ferias

material     perfilería de hierro  lacada

“ … no todas las empresas pueden hacer frente al coste económico que comporta tener un stand, y más aún si la empresa en cuestión está presente en más de una feria a lo largo del  año.  Teniendo en cuenta que los gestores feriales suelen poner a disposición del cliente un diseño estandarizado de stand, la idea de personalizar este con un elemento propio, reconocible y reutilizable resulta sumamente interesante …“

So… Thanksgiving is officially over. We’re fat. We’re stuffed. We’re lazy. Feelin’ the Monday. Shunning the snow.

But not to worry! Rescue is right around the corner—Jacquie just stepped in, which means a fresh cup of cinnamon coffee. And the holidays have crept in, too. Which means it’s time to start searching for those one-of-a-kind, well-designed holiday gifts that makes snobs like us drool over our sleek, aluminum Apple keyboards.

A recommendation? We thought you’d never ask!

How about trying your luck at winning a set of Herman Miller Select Walnut Spinning Tops?

All you have to do is snap a photo of something of yours that is continually inspiring (office toys? A collection of classic lunch boxes in your kitchen? A crate of vintage vinyl 45s?) and submit it to the Herman Miller Select Contest: What Inspires You? by December 14th. With a little luck and holiday spirit, you could win your very own top set—complete with attractive, eco-friendly packaging designed by Tandem.

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

A homely feeling like visiting your grandmother in the countryside is what you get when shopping Jamie Oliver’s simple food range. What you see is what you get – fair and square! – just wrapped in cool graphic packagings with hand types and small drawings and sayings.  The packaging is designed by Pearlfisher

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This is another project(like book design) which is coming to a close now, with only 2 weeks left until the deadline!

With it being our first project when we got back into the 2nd year of our course we all have struggled with this project really, as its coming to the point now where we are running around like headless chickens – we will learn, sometime in the future!

Basically, the brief is to design 3 whole CDs; front cover, back cover, booklet, CD, spines – EVEYTHING! Our tutor set us classical music because he knew that none of us were really into classical music so we could do a project that we didn’t know anything about. He gave us Chopin, Mendelssohn and Mozart to choose between and then we were off into the world of CD design… mainly focusing on the typography. I listened to works from all 3 and chose Mozart because I liked his work the best.

My mind spluttered like a car that has ran out of petrol. Eurgh. Where to start? Well, we had to avoid all the cliche images associated with classical music e.g. flowers, music notes, instruments, the composer, so that helped eliminate some ideas. I listened to some previews of the music to see what it reminded me of, if anything and I used watercolour paints to draw strokes in reflection to the music. I thought about using these with black ink line drawings over the top like work by Natalia Grosner and Baiba Ladiga.

Natalia Grosner (above)

Baiba Ladiga (above)

My watercolour efforts – not as elegant unfortuantly, I am NEW to watercolour (only the second time I have used them) I scanned these in at 500% to get good detail!

After a discussion with my tutor, who saw some of the painting work to be like contours of mountains on a map, I then changed my mind and focused on producing a more typography based design on the style of maps.

I discussed the new idea with my fellow Graphic Design student Luis, and he suggested a more subtle style using white and shades of grey instead of bright, childish colours.

This is the map that is kind of inspiration, found here.

THEN it developed further – I had a brainwave! Luis (now on the foundation course) had been a second year on the National Diploma last year and for one of his projects he had cut some letters (in helvetica of course!) from foam and covered them in white emulsion paint to get a dripping effect. I thought this would be a good way to create my mountain ranges on white paper, and then I could photograph them to get the grey shadows I wanted!

The first attempt didn’t really go how I planned, I left the paint to dry and hoped it would crack a bit – but it didn’t turn out the way I wanted. So I tried again, this time taking my pictures while the paint was wet. I got some good shots, but wasn’t totally happy with them because there was so much grey:

….so I tried again! And this time I used a bit of photoshop, I like the result:

I’ve also been working on the inside booklet, which I have decided to make a fold-out poster of a contour map. Here is the first version, but I need to sort out the font size, colour and create some kind of key so that reading the passage in order is easy to do:

It designed by The Wilderness. I found this from the thedieline.com.
It can be drank all the time:) it looks like so naive and clean.They says that
“We were commissioned by 42 Below Vodka to create branding and packaging for their new bottled water, 420 Spring Water, aimed at the bar and club market. Our intention was to achieve a design that echoed the simplicity of water but simultaneously carried a uniqueness that distinguished it from other bottled waters on the market. Using the by-line “volcanic spring water”, we drew inspiration from the iconic lava lamp for the bottle shape and chose a green tint to mimic the look of glass, providing a differentiator from the blue colour commonly used for bottled water.”

Projet présenté pour le concours Freepack lors du salon VS PACK 2009 à Cognac.

W!neTagg est un nouveau concept d’étiquette pour les secteurs des vins et spiritueux. Derrière cette étiquette se cache en fait un code-barres 2D à flasher avec un téléphone portable 3G.

Ce concept est avant tout une démarche de différenciation de l’offre produit et de développement d’un marketing relationnel utile pour la marque et le consommateur.

Site web : http://winetaggconcept.blogspot.com

Voir l’affiche du projet

]]> http://sinfreno.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/bocn-roll/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:26:46 +0000 jordiboix http://sinfreno.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/bocn-roll/

Se acabo el papel de plata para envolver los bocadillos, ahora viene el BOC’N ROLL ,  formado por una cara textil de algodón y poliéster y una cara en plástico ecológico, reciclable y muy resistente.
grácias Marc!

Product design and packaging inspires me daily. The branding behind D.L. & Co. is beautiful and classically designed. I love the whole vintage gothic look and feel. Since I am sucked into their product visually hopefully it smells good too!

This design is softened up but still gorgeous.
It looks like a little dessert gift box!

The man behind D.L. & Co. is Mr. Douglas Little. He is very intriguing and daring. I love the when designers can break away from the norm, push the limits and test consumers desires in a way that arouses curiosity and pulls us in. Very nice.

Recently I was hired by Launch, an ad agency in the Dallas area, to create some artwork for a new packaging project. They were developing a new logo and packaging for “Bags On Board”, line of pet waste disposal products. They came to me with some concepts already fleshed out and hired me to do the final packaging illustration across the top. I wound up doing I think six different variations on this illustration, one for each product that was being showcased.

I must be in a mood. I have been sitting here saying “Lushhhhh, Lusssssshhhhhhh …”, I must have been making faces as well, my daughter wanted to know what was wrong with my eyes. Sure, try explaining that one. I went with the grin and nod to avoid risk of looking like a wacko.

Lush is wonderful! I had never heard of it until just recently. And ohhh la la do I like it!

About LUSH

The folks at LUSH are a step aside from what we most often hear. And when you take a look at their products, and packaging I’m sure you’ll stand to agree with me. Each item is packaged when mailed, and it’s not heavy wrapping. It’s thing paper wrapping (on the bar of soap of course.) They have beliefs of making effective products, using fresh, organic* fruit and vegetables, fine essential oils, and safe synthetics.

I got to try out, Washday Greens Shampoo

Washday Greens – This shampoo lives up to it’s name. I was surprised when I put the shampoo in my head. It’s very green. Don’t be alarmed. The fragrance of spearmint, and peppermint were wonderful, and so refreshing. Chlorophyll (the stuff that makes plants green), helps to balance out oils, while bay leaf tones the scalp. I loved that it really did balance out my oily hair! It was a lift that was well needed. I could stay in the shower to smell the refreshing mints for hours! After my hair was dry, I could still smell the mint, and it felt as if I had washed away built up ick using this shampoo.
Buy It: $16.95 – 8.4 oz bottle

SnowCake Soap – It has a wonderful smell of almond cake icing, while your washing with it, it really throws out the scent. Mmmm so good. All of my little dogs were waiting outside the bathroom door for me, I suspect they thought I had goodies hiding in there with me. SnowCake soap feels so soft and smooth against your skin. One thing I wish it had more of is lather. I like lots of lather. I would use SnowCake Soap again, just because of how well it felt on my skin, and how I didn’t feel greasy, or oily after I was out of the shower and dried off.
Buy It: $6.95 – 3.5oz bar
I would also like to try Father Frost Soap – Looks like midnight and smells like a garden. If you’ve been good all year round, you may just be rewarded with a large piece of this Christmas soap made with apple juice and cranberries …. You can even use this for a center-piece for Christmas, and after the festivities, cut it up and share it with your friends!

LUSH has a wide variety of products, to sweeten every name on your Christmas gift list, or to fill stockings to the brim. Including, but certainly not limited to gifts under $25. Take a peek, aren’t these precious?And remember, this one is less than $25!

Snow-Fairy Gift

From the back of a packet of (very nice) Tyrrells crisps:

Which means what exactly?

Dieses für ein Bier verdammt ungewöhnliche Packaging kommt von Turner Duckworth, der unter anderem auch das Logo und eine Sonderedition von Metallicas Album Death Magnetic gestaltet hat. Um aber zum Bier zurück zu kommen: Ungewöhnliches Branding schön und gut … aber wer will denn aus so einer Saftflasche sein Bier trinken?

via The Dieline

I’ve blogged about the first series in the Six Scents series and now there’s a second series designed by the likes of Philip Lim, Henrik Vibskov and more. I like the packaging better on the first series but the second one is cool too.

See more: http://www.six-scents.com

Six scents series 1.

Six scents series 2.

Secondo me è un’ottima idea, rende molto.

realizzata da Publicis Mojo.

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