Ikea Packaging

I was in Ikea at the weekend and I couldn’t help but buy loads of stuff I didn’t need from the food shop because the packaging was so good. This styling has been around for a while but great design is timeless. I've seen examples of it before in design press, but when you actually see it you really want to get a hold of it.



When you can reduce something down to it’s most simple form and still communicate it’s core values you have created something special. It’s simplicity is so refreshing. It is so honest, and honesty is really appetising in food retail.

I didn’t look at the price because I trusted it. I don’t know if I’ll like any of it, but who cares! It looks great sitting on my shelves and in my fridge. It stands out against everything.

It even has a sense of humour. Check out the ring pull on the Sardines…

www.stockholmdesignlab.se/ikea/food-packaging/

While you’re on these guys site check out their Ohmine Sake packaging. Lovely stuff!

Steve Oakey

Consistency is everything…

The BBC is having a tough time of it at the moment, which is rather unfortunate as it try’s hard to raise another record breaking sum for Children in Need and also celebrate 90 years of Radio Broadcasting.

Recently we were lucky enough to work at New Broadcasting House, the new home to all things BBC Radio in London, we developed a branded package for their new restaurant and café, which gave us an interesting insight to the BBC and it’s inner workings.

This lead me to reflect on the BBC National Radio Station identities. I’ve always admired a lot of BBC’s design output including the now iconic circle themed display idents:

BBC ONE circle idents.
 

Looking at the old identities as a group, they really were a confusion of designs being created at different times by different teams with different agendas. There wasn’t a common voice at all.

The new designs have far more structure.

The BBC Radio mark is now placed firmly on the top left in a consistent position. The station’s individual idents are all in circles, providing consistency with the TV idents mentioned above.

The individuality of each station however comes with the treatment of the numeric, casting an aspect of its personality or purpose. Some are clever, some subtle and others are just pleasing to the eye 3, 4 and 7 being my personal favorite’s with the clef, speech mark and smile on each summing up the stations primary objective.

These identities, old and new serve to demonstrate how important design, branding and consistency is across a manufacturers’ or service providers’ range of products, be it food packaging or portfolio of investment products online literature. A fact we are very aware of and consider everyday in our work here at Eat with Your Eyes.

If you need help in any of these areas, you know where we are!

Jason Beeby

Edible Art

Combining some of my favourite things, creativity, quirkiness, fun and FOOD! Who wouldn’t love to eat Luke Skywalker made out of icing?!



Now, playing with your food is nothing new but creating real masterpieces out of food is becoming more and more socially acceptable (sorry starving kids in Africa, it's not wastage – it's art!)
Whether it be a vegetable landscape, sushi Mona Lisa or beef burger trainers, edible art has moved on from the macaroni necklace I made my Mum as a child.



Edible art comes in many forms, take self proclaimed artistic chef Heston Blumenthal, he creates dishes he would describe as pieces of art. Edible alcoholic snow, parsnip cereal and snail porridge, but is it really 'art'? I like to see people who really think outside the box and take the idea of food as an art-form to a whole new level (and make it a lot more fun!). Take Bournemouth University, who ran TOAST earlier this year, the edible art exhibition inspired by the London 2012 games. Flaming Grill Pub Co restaurants also got involved, branding their steaks with the faces of Team GB - anyone hungry for a Bradley Grillins or Sir (loin) Chris Hoy?



Anyone can have a go at making their own masterpiece from Morrison's, literally anything is possible (if you have the talent, and the patience), as a modest master cake maker myself I got overexcited at the introduction of the airbrushing kit for cakes, enabling Cake-iteers to literally create works of real art using the icing as a canvas, with endless possibilities – see the Millennium Falcon cake below, amazing. My favourite edible art has to be food masquerading as other food - check out the steak cake!




Hungry for more? For more mouthwateringly good edible art check out http://www.foodnetwork.co.uk/article/28-fascinating-food-art-photos.html

Helene Turner

11.06.12 – Election Day.

Today, Americans go to the polls to vote for their new President and in some people’s eyes, ours too. The Obama machine is well known for its PR campaigns and excellent marketing strategies (remember the Hope poster of 2008). So what better time to give the latest round of brands my eagle-eye critique;

Barack Obama Created by Sol Sender for the 2008 campaign, the Obama ‘O’ was a focal point of the Obama brand and has been retained again for the 2012 edition.

The latest ‘2012’ creation is bolder, featuring a blue background to the previous white. The Gotham font has also been retained, with aded serifs? Can we add serifs to Gotham – for the President of the United States, yes we can!

I like the rural connotations of the logo, it conveys a homely and very American feel – the red and white stripes instantly say to me ‘the land of the free’. One which Siegel and Gale’s New York based President Howard Belk believes too, “There’s a very strong simplicity to it. Visually it suggests a land of opportunity, the wide open country, and an inclusive circle, inviting people to step in”. Though some corners of the design world have criticised it for lacking emotion.

The ‘Forward’ strapline to Obama’s campaign is given its own ‘Google doodle’ in the header of the Obama website - http://www.barackobama.com/; really shows the attention to detail his party is giving it’s every message.

Mitt Romney Romney’s in comparison is quite poor. It’s a very ‘American’ design using a classical font and styling - basic requirement for any presidential candidate. The R’s icon illustrates quite crudely the president and vice-president elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, did anyone guess that!? The icon itself is quite crudely drawn, though you feel it could have been refined given a little more time.




Belk says, “It was originally a double R and now it’s a triple R but either way as a pure piece of graphic design it’s extraordinarily amateurish. The typography is unclear and squishy and there’s no clarity or crispness”, he adds. “The kerning is atrocious, and the letter spacing on the ‘ey’ is so weak,” he adds. Not one to sit on the fence!


It’s believed from various design sources that the Obama 2012 identity is the stronger of the two and some believing the Romney R’s were hastily designed in-house as opposed to Obama’s professionally designed brand. Just goes to show what you can achieve with an agency helping you. And to conclude, lets end with the latest TV ad by the Obama machine – Go Obama! Obama for America, Big Bird TV Advert
 
Or for more videos you can check out Obama’s YouTube page.

 Paolo Ventrone

Why thriving, vibrant creative communities matter to us all.

In the UK, the creative sector is currently growing faster then the economy as a whole, which in our current economic climate is a great driver for providing employment.

It's a real UK success story. According to the Creative Industries Economic Estimates report 2010 produced by DCMS, the creative industries in all their diverse forms represented 5.14% of the UK's employment total, 10.6% of exports and 2.89% of GVA (Gross Added Value). According to Wikipedia, the manufacturing sector accounted for 8.2% of the workforce and 12% of the national output. That's a pretty incredible statistic! In terms of the benefit to local communities, the creative sector firstly has a lot to offer local businesses. There's a creative heartbeat in every successful business – take Apple as the prime example. For creatives, taking risks and pushing boundaries are part of the norm, and this is what drives fresh new ideas and innovations.

Brands are now well established as a key component of a businesses ability to compete, and creatives are at the very centre of building successful brands. Secondly a thriving and vibrant local creative community enriches all our lives and makes our community a much more interesting place to live in and to experience. How can commercial creative businesses such as ours help? By giving our creative sector a Voice to the local business community and local community as a whole – commercial creative companies are in the business of effective communication. We also have a responsibility to help nurture the creative talent of tomorrow which keeps our sector strong and competitive.

Creative businesses can do this in many ways – engaging with art and design students on projects, mentoring, work experience, apprenticeships, part employment so they can afford to pursue university degrees in this difficult economic climate, etc… And we can build a clear and persuasive case for greater investment by Government and private business. We need to prove the indispensability of the creative and cultural industries to business and society as a whole.

However it seems clear that today the creative sector can no longer rely on Government for generous grants and subsidies alone to survive and flourish. It has to learn to operate commercially – and that's where commercial creative companies can provide direction. Mathew Taylor, CEO of the RSA says: "With substantial cuts in public funding and very little sign that private philanthropy is filling the gap we have no choice but to refresh the case for the importance of the arts and develop innovative business models which enable arts organisations to flourish in this difficult environment."

This can and should be a liberating experience – empowering artists, creative practitioners of all disciplines and non-commercial creative organisations to take financial control of their own destiny rather than relying on subsidy, through acquiring commercial business practice tools. I've recently been invited to join a steering group for the Creative Sector in Bedfordshire. I'm really looking forward to exploring how eat with your eyes can make a contribution as a commercial creative company to the Bedfordshire creative community sector.

The opportunity is to align the commercial and public arts scenes much more closely together, so the benefits to both can be reciprocated, and so we can speak more loudly and coherently as one strong voice.
I'll keep you posted on progress, and welcome any ideas anyone has as I undertake this journey.

Tony

Table Type Soy Sauce Bottle (1960)

Instantly recognisable and familiar to everyone, the classic soy sauce bottle is, or has been in everyone’s kitchen cupboard at sometime or another.

A simple study of form and function that works together, a perfect form that is both elegant and practical. The Table Type Soy Sauce Bottle is a great example of a creative modernist design that owes much to Raymond Loewy’s streamlined style.

As a form, the bottle designed by Kenji Ekuan is reassuringly familiar yet mildly exotic. The design was conceived in 1960 and was an immediate success. The design has practical and sturdy elements, such as a wide base for stability and the flowing tapering form suggests a teardrop and gives the bottle a soft organic shape. However this is sharply contrasted by the iconic red flat-topped cap, which has an ingenious double opening ensuring against drips when pouring.

It took three years for Ekuan and his team to arrive at the dispenser’s transparent teardrop shape. More than 100 prototypes were tested in the making of its innovative, dripless spout (based on a teapot’s, but inverted). The design proved to be an ideal ambassador. With its imperial red cap and industrial materials (glass and plastic), it helped timeless Japanese design values - elegance, simplicity and supreme functionality - infiltrate kitchens around the world.

Ekuan wanted a design that could be placed directly on the table and would make elegant centrepiece. Originally the Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottle was intended to be part of a table-top condiment set, but this never happened.

The successful design is made from dishwasher safe glass, it’s refillable and virtually unbreakable - an item intended to keep, re-use and enjoy.

More than 300 million dispensers have been sold, in more than 70 countries. In 2007, to mark its 50th year in the United States, Kikkoman issued a gold-capped version, and the company has also given souvenir bottles, bearing the image of Mickey Mouse, to groups of schoolchildren visiting the factory. But Ekuan’s original design persists.The Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottle may be just a sauce bottle but it shows that simple design principles mixed with functionality can have a longevity and become true design classics, everything has been considered even it’s re-use, quite futuristic thinking in the 1960’s and it still looks as contemporary and modern as it did when it launched 50 years ago.

Frazer Morgan

Food Sells

Now I may be showing my age here, but back in the day everything from cars to chocolate bars were being sold with some oozing sexual undertone.



But gone are the days of a seductively bitten chocolate bar or a bikini clad girl draped over a bonnet. Food is the new sex that sells. Car manufactuars are making cars out of cakes in the television adverts, rather then showing their latest gas guzzler speeding round a coastal road driven by some chiseled chin Lothario, accompanied by a panting, pout lipped companion.



Even the press adverts extol the benefits of writing on fruit, rather then displaying the retaining skills of their models bikini. But this shift isn’t just the provenance of the motor industry, even the media are using food to capture their audiences attention with this latest advert from Sky.

So why this shift? I think it’s because food appeals, it makes your mouth water! Food can offer an experience that is achievable to everyone. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working here so much, we understand the power of the food experience.

Steve Humber