one club talk: the future is sexy!

here's a little preview from the evening with the client we posted last month for the one club here in NYC. my talk started out slow and plodding but the fine editors at the one club made a smart preview you see here. a full length version should be ready soon. remember [and to paraphrase myself]: the future is sexy.

if you're a student, there's still time to enter to one club college competition. the info is here.

support independent design and buy nooka for all your holiday needs [put nooka on your holiday gift guides as i know many of my readers here are premier bloggers of the world!] our site is www.nooka.com and north american online store is here.

package design

this semester i am teaching the senior package design for the first time at parsons [the new school]. i taught design process, web process and print process previously, so being asked to teach package design was not just a nice change, but perfect timing personally as i grapple with package design issues daily with nooka. i only have 5 students, which i thought would be a problem, but they're all good students [in previous classes of 15 students, i was lucky if i got 2 students who were mentally present and did the assignments as instructed].

i started with a philosophical approach and the story of pandora's box to get them thinking about how everything is packaged, including our bodies in our skin, the clothes [and cosmetics] we wear, the tubes and ways we buy these things. i want the students to think of the emotional aspect of packaging, especially how one felt as a kid opening a present, and to identify personal experiences of purchasing a product based on the packaging alone [a book cover IS a package which illustrates another class exercise: package AS product]. then i went onto exercises to identify the basic purposes of packaging and the many concerns facing a designer with each:
as protection for the product in transit [from factory, to store, to consumer, to use],
as branding,
as value-add [including 'package as product'].

We also discussed context as a main concern [prada doesn't need elaborate packaging because of the context of both the brand and the selling environment, a new product in a supermarket does], eco-concerns [the greenest package is no package, differences between recyclable and renewable resources etc.], as well as cost concerns and how they affect design [I was shocked that none of my students knew the relationship between oil prices and the cost of plastics!].

another mandatory task for this class is to keep a blog to share information with each other and to collect design reference. and i would like to share some of them here with you.

kevin, nia, elaine, joan.

above image is from a product i bought in japan [but have yet to use] because i liked the package called sylotee & bee polish. It's a tooth polishing system for stains regular brushing won't remove and consist of a silicone eraser and special polish. cute huh? my only criticism is: why isn't he/she smiling? more on the product in japanese here.

the giants and super tuesday

i was told by our new intern, carl 2.0 [karl 1.0 was last year's design intern...both from sweden] that my blog is more interesting when i write about non-nooka stuff, so here's another rant for you.

as you know, the new jersey giants won the bowling championship [or something with bowls] this past sunday and new york city decided to have a ticker tape parade today. it also happens to be super tuesday, and i wanted to vote before i went to the office. i live just east of the parade route, so on a practical note, the parade route separated me from the polling location – no biggie, just frustrating finding an intersection where i could cross. what i didn't expect was how depressed, almost to the verge of tears, the sight of all these football fans made me. in a country where 70 million people have NO health insurance; the fact that so many people felt it a good thing to take a day off of work and take their children out of school to celebrate the win of a game they did not participate in made me think of how dismal the education system in the united states really is. how is it that people can invest so much energy into a parade and not keeping the streets paved, the airports up-to-date, the population insured....

on another note: i boarded the subway from a station i normally don't take and took this great photograph of a paint splatter on the platform! also, hypebeast did a mention of the lego show i wrote about last week making me a minor internet star yet again!