On our way home from a standee installation at a movie theater last week, my fiancee stopped the car abruptly and jumped out. She grabbed a cardboard box covered in what appeared to be hand scrawled black Sharpie lettering and drawings. After commenting that I didn’t want to go to jail for stealing garbage, I put the box in the back seat, and we sped off. Needless to say, the box now lives in our front room, an example of pop art and corrugated board printing.
Why? What makes this box so special?
The Product
First of all, the box is different from most other boxes. It is covered in black Sharpie (or so it appears). The company website (it is a nut company) is displayed prominently and underlined. It also appears to be hand lettered (albeit in white). There is almost no place for the eye to rest on any of the four printed sides of the cube (the box is of almost equal dimensions) because there is writing everywhere.
Most of the writing comprises puns, and comments about how delicious the nuts are and how this is a family business. The marketing copy exudes an almost childlike innocence, a sense of wonder and energy and fun. You want to read every word. Then you want to eat the nuts and keep the carton. There are even several cute drawings of nuts with faces, feet, and a hat.
From a marketing point of view, what makes this special:
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- First of all, it is very personal and friendly in tone, in contrast to most printed carton art. It draws the viewer into the world of the nut-maker by appealing to his/her sense of humor.
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- It also stands out from almost all other packaging art in that it appears to be hand lettered. Clearly it has been printed. However, only when you think of the labor involved in hand-lettering thousands or hundreds of thousands of boxes do you start to think about how it was printed.
- The overall “feel” is of a local food co-op. The box is brown corrugated board. The writing is black ink, except for the white logo, so there is a bit of an environmentally-conscious vibe going on here. It’s casual, approachable, anything but corporate.
The Process
So how was this produced?
Creating the art was easy enough. The graphic designers either produced a hand-lettered original, which they then scanned and brought into the page composition software, or they drew the lettering and images of nuts with faces and legs with a tool like the Wacom Tablet and a stylus (i.e., they created the art within a drawing or painting program).
Producing the carton could have entailed one of three commercial printing processes: inkjet, flexography, or custom screen printing.
Custom screen printing would have been ideal if the press run were large enough. Setting up the screens and ink is labor intensive, so only a long run will justify the make-ready cost. When I look at the box with a high-powered loupe, I don’t see the thick ink film I’ve come to expect from screen printing.
Flexography would have been optimal for shorter press runs, since offset printing would have crushed the fluting in the corrugated board. The rubber plates used for flexography would have printed the artwork on the carton without damaging it, and for small to mid-sized press runs, the process would have been economical. (You’ll find a lot of package printing done via flexography, particularly frozen food cartons, milk cartons, etc.)
When I look closely, I see faint outlines around the lettering. The ink is rather thin and transparent, so you can see not only the fibers of the cardboard, but you can also see that the density of ink within the letters is lighter and the outlines of the letters are a bit darker. This is indicative of flexography.
The third option would be inkjet. This would be great for very short runs or variable data custom printing, in which each box would be slightly different from the others. Since inkjet print heads don’t actually touch the substrate, the process is also great for corrugated board because it won’t crush the fluting. But when I look at the type and images through my high-powered loupe, I don’t see the minuscule ink droplets indicative of inkjet printing.
So I’ll vote for flexography as the process used. That would be my best guess.
What You Can Learn
Here are a number of things to think about:
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- If you do something totally different, it will stand out. In a world full of standardized cartons, this one really catches the eye.
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- Consider your audience. Crafting a personal tone and casual appearance works for this nut company. It would usually not work for a computer company (although I have seen some simple black ink-on-corrugated-board marketing work from Apple over the years).
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- Consider the most appropriate commercial printing technology. Offset printing crushes corrugated board. Screen printing, flexography, and inkjet printing do not. Be mindful of both the economics of custom printing (the most efficient and cost-effective way to print) and the functional requirements of a print job.
- From time to time, take a chance. My fiancee loved the design. That’s why she took it as pop art (think Andy Warhol in the ’60s). Some people won’t like it because it’s so outlandish. Great design doesn’t play it safe.
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on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Packaging.
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