the perfect pineapple package

How do you package an item that has it's own packaging?


That's the question I've been trying to answer all week long. A pineapple's skin already serves as its protection, or its packaging. Most pineapples are placed in boxes for shipment only, then displayed in stores in their whole form, without anything around them. I began researching innovative packaging methods, and came across a picture of three healthy fruits packaged as if they were vices in today’s society:

http://www.daizizheng.com/projects1.htm

Carrots packaged as cigarettes, celery packaged as McDonald's french fries, and blueberries packaged as pills. Daizi Zheng, the designer calls this product design collection "Stereotype." On her website she says:

"According to the World Health Organization (WHO), unhealthy diet is amongst one of the leading causes of the major non-communicable diseases. Can design encourage people to rethink their relationship with healthy food to gain a balanced diet?

The series of food packaging were created from the observations on personal behaviors. Using the recognizable stereotyping packaging would make people feel more physically and physiologically connected with those daily objects. By giving the good food a little make over, it could contribute the availability of healthy food and encourages people to make a change for their everyday life."

I began thinking of other vices, and how I could  again promote the health benefits of eating pineapple, like I did in our previous project. I saw the shape of the pineapple as a natural equivalent to a 2L soda bottle:

From there I began to think about how to identify the product and provide nutritional facts. I started playing with different ideas of how to make a soda label, for a pineapple. I wanted the label to be colorful and eye-catching, but not too loud. I've had some trouble finding the right font as well, but I think I've found the general shape of what I want the main part of the label to look like:

I think the font is too curly, but I like the simple, round-cornered rectangle.

explore what's out there

A part of starting something new, I think, is taking the time to explore how others do that something. For me-blogging is brand-spanking-new--I may read a lot of blogs and have friends who write regularly, but I have never taken a stab at it before now. I looked at a handful of sketching blogs by illustrators and designers that were recommended.

The first blog I visited was an open [sketch]book. Suzanne Cabrera's blog is fun and colorful, which I think is mostly attributed to the fact that her blog's background is white--the same color as her sketchbook's paper--so her drawings really pop off the screen. Her title block is inviting--the little illustration of sketchbooks with the title in a large, sans-serif font with the subtitle in a font similar to her handwriting (or may be her actual handwriting) incorporates the 2 mediums she uses to communicate--the computer and her hand. She opens up about her thought processes in her writing, and says outright that she wants to "make this a place you enjoy visiting every day by taking steps to include you in even more of my inspirations." (Entry from 09/16/10). Cabrera uses her blog as a way she can graphically document her thoughts, things she sees, or questions she wants to ask to share them with the world.

The second blog I went to was Edgar Cabrera’s. Cabrera is the husband of Suzanne Cabrera, the author of an open [sketch]book. The setup of his blog is similar to that of his wife, but is more structured--you can see the template that Blogger provides more than on an open [sketch]book. However, he still uses the same white background as his wife to showcase his work in the best possible way. Cabrera's work is both 2D and 3D--he does woodwork as well as illustration, which he brings together to show how he wants to construct a piece before he makes it. He uses many different formats for conveying his ideas:: boxy, gesture sketches, colorful and detailed illustrations and photos. 

On Crack Skull Bob, I found the formatting to be similar to the last couple blogs I have seen; but I noticed that there is a regular schedule of images. Every Sunday he posts a sketch called “Sunday Morning Talking Heads,” a composite of all the political talking heads featured on the Sunday morning political talk shows, with sound bites written around these mini portraits. The way they’re set up graphically displays the confusion that many people experience when trying to follow politics. He also uses many mediums on top of one another. Some drawings look like black and white pen drawings, with coloring done on Photoshop, or some with coloring done by hand, and then enhanced on the computer.

Tommy Kane's site doesn't look like a Blogger site at all--he's developed a title banner to customize his site. When something is posted, it's described and given a reason for its existance. Drawings are scanned straight out of the sketchbook, making them look more real and not computer-generated. He was really the only blogger I saw who critiqued his own stuff, without doing it in a round-about way.

Wagonized is created by a completely different blog template--Typepad. I've never heard of Typepad before, but I can see the format differences. The organization of posts and images are on the left side, while the information and other links are on the right side, leaving the center--the most important part of the blog (the meat, if you will)--to display the content. There is a dichotomy in the final images on the screen; in some illustrations his work is almost scientific in its detail, while in others it's childish in its style but clear in its descriptiveness. He also admits and shows when things go wrong; which is more honest than the writing on other blogs. 

The final blog I looked at belongs to Andrea Joseph. Her blog is rougher than others; her scanned sketches show the binding in her Moleskine journals. She takes the time to break down how a drawing is made and guides her readers through the process, step-by-step, so that they can make their own detailed hatching sketch of a shoe--just like Jackson.

advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.

The most recent project, "to develop the optimal graphic strategy for representing your object in a way that highlights it unique qualities, its assets and its potential uses" was harder than it should have been. 

Finding the qualities assets and uses of a pineapple shouldn't be hard-the pineapple is an everyday object that we see almost every time we walk into the supermarket-but pinpointing the reason it's necessary is more complicated with an everyday object. Looking deeply into the reasoning behind why a pineapple is grown, shipped, and bought is not a common thought process. 

So, I found Wikipedia to be helpful in finding more information on this fruit I wanted to know more about. I learned a lot, actually. It takes about 30 months to grow a full-sized pineapple; and they are grown on nearly every continent in the world. Pineapples have 3 types of vitamins: vitamin B, vitamin C & manganese. It is also a sign of welcoming or homecoming in many cultures (there's no wonder why my grandparents hung their "pineapple flag" outside their house every time we'd come to visit). I also found that in the Philippines, people scrape the flesh off of pineapple leaves, and use the fiber to create a textile called piña. However, I found most of this information to be a dead end.


I started thinking about the forms in which we find pineapple in a grocery store. There's the whole fruit, both fresh and dried slices, juice, canned pineapple, frozen pieces, and pre-portioned cups made for kids. My mom used to buy fruit cups for my lunches or snacks--they're really easy to transport, and easy to eat. I had found my target--mothers who wanted healthy options for their kids.

Dole Pineapple Fruit Cup

Now that I had found who I wanted to sell pineapple to, I had to figure out how. I knew I wanted to compare the product (fruit cups) to something unhealthy, but I didn't know what to use as the negative option. I thought that depicting a child playing in a fun, active environment would help show the healthy lifestyle mothers want for their children. I found a picture of a child on a see-saw in a gallery of photos people had taken for a non-profit called Kaboom! (they build playgrounds all over the world in communities where there are no kid-friendly spaces), and thought that showing the child playing with something undesirable (the mean kid, perhaps) could be equated with them putting unhealthy food in their bodies.

Taking the two ideas of the portability of the fruit cup and the health benefits of the fruit helped me to make an ad convincing mothers to take the healthy, but quick 'n easy route of buying these pineapple fruit cups.

Looking at my final project now, I see elements I like and dislike. I still like the idea of equating a child playing with a bad influence (the "bad seed") with eating unhealthy food, and depicting that metaphor with a child playing with the "bad seed." Showing the health benefits: "Dole Pineapple Fruit Bowls are loaded with B vitamins and manganese," was also a good idea, I thought. It was important to explain why the product was better than an unhealthy snack option. I also like the font I used--it's legible, and fun, but assertive with its all-capitals form. 

I dislike that I did not think about the hierarchy of the images on the page, and that it shows so well. The first portion of text: "If you won't let your child play with the bad seed at the playground," is completely illegible from afar because of the color contrast. The second part: "then why would you let them eat unhealthy snacks?" is better, but still not up to par. The image of the packaged fruit cups should have been the most important image on the page, not the child and the seed. The text shouldn't have been as large as it was, and should have (obviously) been legible in terms of its color. 

quotation on title block from http://www.quotegarden.com/advertising.html. Author of quotation unknown.

the pineapple-covered postcard

Bringing yourself to look into what is really important about an everyday object takes a lot more brain power than I ever expected. 

Finding meaning in texts, films, and other forms of self-expression is easier--there's a reason for every moment; every decision is deliberate. But taking something as normal and natural as a piece of fruit (a pineapple, to be exact), and discovering what's important about it, what makes it unique & unearthing how this object expresses itself when it cannot communicate for itself is one of the most interesting challenges I have ever come across.

My object, the pineapple, has one of the most common attributes that any fruit or vegetable has--a protective skin. Come to think of it; all beings have a protective layer, not just fruits or veggies. Thinking back on it, my profound idea a week ago--that there is a dramatic contrast between the spiky, dangerous protective skin on the outside of a pineapple and it's sweet, sticky, soft (when ripe/overripe) fleshy insides--isn't that profound at all. 

my pineapple postcard

Taking on the task of describing something so vague--contrast between skin & flesh of a fruit--in a graphic manner now seems more complicated than I once thought. There were many ways I could've taken my design to dramatize the commonplace contrast I decided to focus on. The colors of the flesh & the skin are very similar; however, the top of the pineapple--its leaves--are the most unique part of the fruit. They're a different color-green; they curve out instead of in, and they give the pineapple its trademark height. All of the elements of these leaves are components I didn't use, and should have. 

I do still enjoy the visual excitement of the photo of the pineapple's skin; it has more visual interest, and therefore looks like it is supposed to be the focus of the image (when the two images were really meant to get equal attention).