We are constantly amazed at the ingenuity and imagination that goes into packaging these days, practical factors (occasionally) be damned. This week, we finally find a wallet we like (it’s caffeinated!), take a trip back through time with an LP sleeve, and find ourselves getting toothache over limited edition ale packaging. (You can find previous Cool Packaging of the Week right here.)
Coffee-Sweets Combo Packaging
Aiming to unite two very different brands, French design student Alex Celaire came up with this colorful wallet that places Calisson du Roy René candied almonds and Nespresso coffee containers in the palm of your hand. Sure there are plenty of questions here: What’s holding the coffee containers to the wallet and, more troublingly, what’s holding the almonds. But you can drown in details, and the fact remains that this colorful wallet of sweetness seems like just the thing for any less-than-sweet day you might have.
Sebastian Fraye Vol. 1 Album Packaging
When this California native isn’t making a living as a graphic designer, he’s bringing together a number of different musical samples to create new and unusual… enough of that: dude’s just put out an album. It’s called Vol. 1 and its cover will appeal to pretty much anyone 30 and up who not only haunted their local record store, but pretty much any store back in the day. (If you’d told us long ago that we’d get all nostalgic over those little price-gun stickers that were a bear to remove, we’d have thought you crazy, and yet…) All stickers on the album cover were scanned from Sebastian’s personal collection.
Old Wooden Tooth Ale Packaging
Pity the poor beer, wine & spirits designer who every day must face the fact that theirs is the one industry known for superlative design – phone it in at your peril. Which means you know anything in this category has to be good if we include it in “Cool Packaging…” Behold: Old Wooden Tooth, a limited edition Russian Imperial Stout released to celebrate the first anniversary of Taft’s Ale House in Cincinnati. According to The Dieline, 1 Trick Pony joined forces with Steinhauser, a family owned custom label printer, to create this number.
“Each 500mL bottle comes packaged in a custom branded wooden box and features a neck flag and label that are custom printed with 9 colors including a metallic copper ink on a cherry veneer label.”
We’ve lived in Washington, DC and we’ll tell you right now this is one of the classiest things to appear in modern times bearing the great man’s name.
