I have a confession to make. My true love as an art director is package design. I’ve had this heartthrob since I was fresh out of college. I was the fledgling designer with Adflex; a small packaging and flexographic company in Rochester, NY. The design group of Adflex consisted of newbie designers and some 30+ year lifers. Everyday we’d hunch over our drawing boards creating 3D masterpieces. Once approved these were then flattened and drawn out on past-up boards. The boards themselves were pieces of art because at times they would take weeks to produce. These were handcrafted with ruby and amberlith, non-repro blue pencils, rapidograph pens, viles of ProWhite and freshly waxed gallies of type. We also applied plenty of stats from “The Monster”; our behemoth stat machine. We loved pouring wax from the wax machine into a chair and watch as our victim wallowed in a warm seat of yuck. Ahhh, those were the days! Okay, I gotta stop. I’m starting to twitch. I’m so glad we use computers now.
I consider myself fortunate because I’ve had many creative opportunities and I’ve been able to design packaging for some pretty nifty clients. Yes, I admit when I finished the PS2 game accessory packaging for InterAct Technologies and GameShark I rushed out to see them in the local Kmart, BestBuy and GameStop retail stores. You probably saw me. I was the design dork who was endlessly walking up and down the isles admiring my creative on their racks and shelves. I think this was the only time I did this. Well, maybe not. Since then I’ve created retail product packing for French Shriner; a men’s shoe company. Then came packaging for Gordini LavaWool and a bunch of GORE-TEX retail promotional kits for ski shops. These were a blast to work on. It was exciting to design over-sized direct mail promotions and retail information kits for Invista. Most recently was the gift box for the thick films materials company Heraeus, which is based out of Germany. They wanted to celebrate 40 years of success with their loyal customer base and jumped at my idea to offer them a wine toasting set.
A moment ago I sent these photos (below) to BookEntries@TheDieline.com to see if they’ll be in “Box. Bottle. Bag.” This is a packaging book TheDieline.com and How Books are publishing and due on store shelves in the early part of 2010. If you haven’t submitted your package designs YOU’D BETTER HURRY! All entries are FREE but due in by Friday March 27th! Think any of mine cut it?
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