Perhaps the best compliment a packaging designer can receive is when someone says “I love the container more than the product” – a reaction that is probably far more common than you think. This week we tackle the gold (foil) standard for beer gift boxes, tickle the ivories for a suite of cakes, and embrace the intergalactic conspiracy implied by a mockup for milk packaging. (Previous Cool Packaging of the Week can be found right here.)
1 Horse Beer Packaging
The lovable rapscallions over at design studio 1 Trick Pony have evolved their annual client gift tradition – affectionately known as “the Alcoholidays” – from slightly eccentric offerings to this Taft’s Ale House exclusive, which is breathtakingly gorgeous even before your beer goggles kick in. As the agency told The Dieline:
““Clients received their 16oz. can of beer in a ‘1-Pack’ – a gold foiled box with a perforated opening at the top that resembles an old beer can tab….most of them have contacted the agency asking for another 1-Pack because they put the first one on display in their office.”
Piano Cake Packaging
This is one of those projects that makes you ask yourself “How did this even occur to somebody?” Suffice it to say that not only did it occur to Latona Marketing, they went ahead and made this gift box for a type of small French cake called a “financier” a reality. As they tell Packaging of the World:
“We cut costs by focusing on only one design, and in making use of all six surfaces, we were able to recreate every type of keyboard. Using this design, we can create any keyboard size, from small keyboards to full 88-key grand pianos, and even larger. For example, for one octave of 13 keys, we use 8 cakes. Two octaves, or 25 keys, would be 15 cakes. Three octaves, or 37 keys, would be 22 cakes. And an 88-key grand piano would be a gift box of 52 cakes.”
‘Molocow’ Milk Packaging
Occasionally there is an upside to living in a coarse, no-holds-barred society. For starters, you get bonkers concept packaging like this that references decades of cattle mutilations that many believe to be the handiwork of alien visitors. “We reimagined milk bottle and package to appeal for kids,” says Kyrgyzstan creative agency I-Media in a sentence that would stop the hearts of children’s advocacy groups that had conniption fits over the Teletubbies. Can you think of a child – heck, can you think of an adult – who wouldn’t buy this? (Perhaps we need to pass the hat around to make this one a reality….)
