El Producto Cigar Tin, designed by Paul Rand
An entire book could be devoted to the designs Paul Rand created for El Producto cigars in the early 1950s – from an advertising campaign, where every week for a year or more he drew a different funny cigar holding a cigar (in its hands, of course), to the various gift packages, including one with a Man Ray-inspired photogram on the cover. There is so much material and recently, I was given a tin designed by Rand that even I had never laid eyes on before or knew existed. It currently sits on a shelf above my computer, and honestly, I cannot take my eyes off of it – it’s taken on the status of a religious reliquary.
Still, a can is a can (unless it contains something special, like grandma’s ashes) and this is the quintessential cylindrical tin with metal top that can be opened only by using the church key soldered to the bottom. Yet Rand’s playful graphics – the colors, image, and lettering – are so joyous that it could never be thrown away without experiencing some kind of guilt. Incidentally, joyful is a very apt description because this was not just any common cigar container; rather it held 25 “Bouquets” designed specifically for new fathers to hand out in celebration of the birth of a son – not a daughter (although that can just might exist too).
The image features one of Rand’s phallic cigar-characters holding a cigar in one hand and a baby milk bottle in the other while a stork (similar to one he drew for the cover for the Stork Club cocktail book) holds a basket with a cherubic infant peering comically over the edge. The background color is a mellow sky blue (similar to Obama Blue) with the linear stork rendered in reddish purple and the basket in white. The baby is “newborn pink” with a red dot for the nose – cute yet not maudlin. The lettering for the El Producto logo is the stencil-style that Rand once explained referred to the stencils on huge burlap bales of tobacco, and under the stork’s spindle legs, scrawled in Rand’s script, is the phrase “it’s a boy!” While on the top – the piece de resistance – also in his script, is the slogan “proud fathers give El Producto.”
Although this was a calculated attempt to sell more rancid smelling cigars by reinforcing the manufactured tradition that men give cigars to commemorate their newborns, this was something special. Prefiguring Rand’s carnival-esque package designs for IBM, this can humanized the product like no other in its genre. Most cigar labels and boxes followed the 19th century penchant for Victorian-style engravings and color lithographs of famous figures, scantily clad ladies, and vintage plantations. Instead, Rand rejected all the conventions of cigars by inventing his own branding language that clear set El Producto apart from the competition. It is, well, joyous.
– Steven Heller
Steven Heller is the co-chairman (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts. He writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review, and is the author, co-author, and/or editor of over 100 books on design and popular culture.
Categories: Objectify Me
A fellow Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker, Andrew Berends, has been arrested in Nigeria on suspicion of espionage while working on his new film about the troubled Delta oil region.
From AP: A U.S. documentary filmmaker was arrested along with his translator and accused of spying after he filmed soldiers in Nigeria’s troubled oil region, a military spokesman and media rights organization said Tuesday.
Nigerian Lt. Col. Sagir Musa said the military handed the American to state security operatives for questioning after arresting him in the southern oil center of Port Harcourt. He said investigators were seeking “to ascertain his mission and why he intruded in our operational area, snapped video shots of troops and their deployment without clearance.”
The Paris-based rights group Reporters Without Borders identified the filmmaker as Andrew Berends, from New York. Berends was arrested with his Nigerian interpreter and a local bar owner on Aug. 31 in the southern city of Port Harcourt, the group said in a statement.
Ways you can help: if you’re in the states, contact your representative in Congress and ask him or her to take action on Andrew’s behalf. You can also call Andrew’s representative, Yvette Clarke, at 718-287-1142. Or write New York Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. If you’re not in the US, please try and spread the word about Andrew’s situation to your local government officials and media. Any pressure we can apply on the Nigerian government this week may help get Andrew released quickly.
Update: Friends have now started a blog to post developments in Andy’s case.
Categories: Musings
You may recall that in an earlier post I thought I remembered a techno record made up of Braun appliance sounds? I’d wondered whether it was a figment of my imagination, since no amount of googling could turn up any mention of it. Well I wasn’t crazy, it exists! Braun fanatic and Objectifiers member Bharani Padmanabhan actually has the record in question, and sent me photos, above. He says there are no markings anywhere on the record, no artist name, no record label name, nothing. But it looks exactly as I remembered it. Why would I have that image stored away for 15 years? The brain is a strange instrument…
Bharani is lending me the record for a few weeks. To be continued…
– Gary
Categories: Musings
I’m in Tokyo this week, and had the privilege of spending a day in the busy studio of Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa. My taxi ride there ended prematurely when the side street we were driving on became so narrow that the driver actually got the cab wedged between the walls on each side of the street. He managed to reverse to a slightly wider area and let me out, and I continued the journey on foot.
Fukasawa is known for his work with companies like Muji, IDEO, NEC, KDDI/AU, Issey Miyake, and his in-house design brand plusminuszero. During the interview we talked about the differences between Japanese and American design, and the different ways each culture relates to objects. We discussed the pros and cons of plastic and other materials. We also talked about his creative inspirations, and the concept of designing “without thought” — how people’s unconscious (and sometimes unintended) uses of objects can inspire new design possibilities. A few examples of this are Fukasawa’s umbrella with an indentation for holding your bag, and his Light with a Dish for catching your keys and change.
I did some vérité filming of the studio at work, with Fukasawa and his staff fluidly switching back and forth between new chair designs and an exhibition design. Afterwards I visited the plusminuszero shop, and did some filming at the huge Muji store in Ginza the next day.
Doing more shooting around Tokyo this week… if it would just stop raining…
Kanpai!
–Gary
Categories: Film News, Production Stills
The latest in our series of guest posts where people we like discuss objects that inspire them
Despite its diminutive size, the shuttlecock — a 2.7-inch high cone of white feathers stuck into a rounded cork base — seems to me to contain all the time and space of a long summer’s afternoon on a large green lawn. In its delicately ribbed frame are encapsulated pitchers of lemonade, the drone of bees, the smell of mown grass and the sun-baked mustiness of the garden sheds where shuttlecocks rest along with broken croquet mallets, dog-chewed Frisbees and trapped flies.
Considered in an urban environment, such as on a shelf in my Manhattan office, the shuttlecock is only half an object. While it hints at a future of action, the likelihood of it actually being borne aloft, into a sky free of telephone wires and sirens, is pretty slim. In its dormant state it becomes a mere shadow of its potential self in flight, when it thwacks through the air, cork base forward in an aerodynamic thrust that has inspired the design of space shuttles.
I no longer have its package, but my forlorn and flightless birdie was probably constructed in China, since that is where most of them are produced, thanks to that country’s large poultry population and consequent access to goose and duck feathers. It’s also likely that it was made at a company in the Guangzhou Province, called Double Happiness, a name that must jar on its workers who spend too long each day hand-stitching and gluing 16 feathers into each nose of leather-coated cork. There’s no designer for me to thank for my shuttlecock, since its form emerged out of the combined efforts of the players of the 18th century Indian game Poona, and the British Army officers who imported it to British lawns in the late 1800s. One genesis theory is that since quill pens used to be stored in corks, a bunch of them together in one may have inspired some bored clerk to toss it across the room at a fellow worker.
And so, now, deprived of the ability to soar, the function of my shelved shuttlecock is to conjure memories in which the facts of my own childhood and the fiction of A Room With A View-style garden parties are rolled into one yearning reverie — the kind that is actually necessary from time to time amid our future-oriented itineraries.
– Alice Twemlow
Alice Twemlow is the chair of the new MFA program in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Categories: Objectify Me
Double Objectified news action: design writer Alice Rawsthorn profiles Marc Newson and his design for the interior of the new Airbus A380 double-decker “superjumbo” jet for Australian airline Qantas.
“Designing an aircraft is like creating a mini-world,” Newson said. “You’re putting people in a confined environment and controlling how they’ll feel with the oxygen, humidity, and everything they touch and see. It all has an effect.”
The plane will be making its first flight next month, and begin commercial service in October. Read the full story on the International Herald Tribune’s site.
Categories: Design News
Most of the interviews for the film have already been shot, but there are a few late additions we’re doing this month. One is BMW’s Chris Bangle. Bangle is based in Munich, but we missed him when we were in Germany a few months back. He was visiting the States this week to attend the Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach, so DP Luke Geissbuhler and I headed out to California to meet up with this controversial designer. “A wild-eyed revolutionary destroying one of Europe’s blue-chip luxury brands? The most influential automotive designer of the early 21st century?” asked an article in Motor Trend.
The Concours was a complete circus… there was no parking, it was swarming with people, and it was impossible to find a quiet place to interview Bangle anywhere near the show’s headquarters at the Lodge at Pebble Beach. So Luke and I commandeered a new BMW X6, threw Bangle in, and headed north along the Pacific coast. We found a vacant stretch of land overlooking the ocean, and actually conducted most of the interview inside the car.
Our conversation topics included the evolution of automotive design over the last 50 years, the emotional appeal of the automobile, the differences between European and American design, his work at BMW, and his thinking on user interface, materials, sustainability, and the future of car design (and even of the car itself).
At some point soon we’ll be uploading clips from a number of our interviews for your viewing pleasure.
Back to the studio,
–Gary
Categories: Film News, Production Stills
For a while now I’ve been ranting about the inexplicable over-design of toothbrushes. Why the toothbrush of all things, has been lavished with unnecessary inlaid plastic, rubbery bits and detailed parts had me worked up to such a degree that I was preparing to write an article about it. In preparation, I went out and bought several toothbrushes, including the most expensive, complex one I could find. I decided, in fairness, I should try it out.
The moment I took it out of its package I was surprised by how perfectly it fit in my hand. Rubber ribs nestled just below the knuckle of my index finger; the unusual curve of the handle fell below my pinky, encouraging my hand into an elegant, natural form. It seemed to almost propel my fingers back and forth in a brushing motion. Then I got it in my mouth. The bristles seemed to snuggle over my molars with a massaging hug. The bizarre rubbery bits inside the bristles made obvious and satisfying contact with the top of the tooth. And the strange, nubbly mat on the reverse side from the bristles gently scrubbed inside my cheek: double action! As I brushed, the feeling was unlike anything I’ve ever had with another toothbrush: it was pleasurable, sensuous and assuredly effective. I was astonished, as this previously tedious task was transformed into one of life’s daily pleasures.
If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.
For now, I will simply brush my teeth.
– Marian Bantjes
Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer and artist-thing working internationally from her home base on an island off the west coast of Canada.
Categories: Objectify Me
Bad design is where the customer thinks it’s their fault that something doesn’t work. So if you can’t make your GPS device work in your car — I mean, there should be a riot because they’re so poorly designed! Instead, the user thinks, ‘Oh, I’m not very smart, I can’t make this GPS thing work.’ People should demand more from the things they own, they need to demand that things work.
– David Kelley, IDEO
Categories: Quotes
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