Cultural forces and commercial constraints: Designing packaging in the twentieth-century United States

Journal of Design History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 25-43

  Porter, Glenn ^a  

^a Hagley Museum and Library   (United States)

Author keywords

Advertising; Business management; Consumer products; Industrial design packaging; United states

Indexed keywords

EID: 63249103318     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/12.1.25     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Du Pont Cellophane Company, Meet Mrs. Allen, New York, 1934. This pamphlet is in the collections of the Hagley Museum and Library, as are all other Du Pont-related items cited herein unless otherwise indicated
2. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1976, is the best-known version of this interpretation
3. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, Pantheon, New York, 1989, is a balanced treatment that recognizes other effects of consumer society, including positive ones, but emphasizes waste and environmental harm. See especially her Chapter 9
4. See Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1985. The quotations are from p. xvii
5. Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Little, Brown, Boston, MA, 1995. This lively book emphasizes, as its title implies, the psychological and symbolic dimensions of packaging
6. Marketing textbooks customarily devote attention to packaging as an element in their overall treatment. See, for example, Joel R. Evans & Barry Berman, Marketing, 5th edn., Macmillan, New York, 1992, Ch. 11
7. 'Branding and packaging', pp. 302-33. The changes in retailing and consumption are analysed in a number of studies, of which Strasser, op. cit., is particularly noteworthy
8. See also Richard D. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass marketing in America, Basic Books, New York, 1990. British package designer Milner Gray noted that as late as 1900 in Britain 'many classes of goods, including foodstuffs, were still sold loose under very unhygienic conditions
9. It was largely the influence of American industry which changed all this.' Milner Gray, Package Design, Studio Publications, London, 1955, p. 8
10. A sense of the array of packaging options available as early as about 1905 in the United States can be derived from the Abner Royce Company's Catalogue-Describing and Illustrating the Packages of the Royce Line (Cleveland, OH, n.d.), Trade Catalog Collection, Hagley Museum and Library
11. A good textbook is Louis C. Barail, Package Engineering, Reinhold, New York, 1954
12. Richard B. Franken & Carroll B. Larrabee, Packages That Sell, Harper, New York, 1928, p. 282
13. Franken and Larrabee listed twenty-nine types of machinery used in packaging in their 1928 text and described it as a partial listing. They also summarized data from the US Department of Commerce's 1925 Census of Manufactures and several of its subsequent reports on employment and production in establishments making paper boxes and fancy covered metal boxes, tin cans and other tinware, tin and other foils, and glass containers. Franken & Larrabee, op. cit., pp. 283-94
14. The Packaging Catalog, beginning in 1929, listed scores of firms that provided machinery, equipment and supplies used in the packaging industries. Some had been in business for decades, and a few traced their origins back to the era before the Civil War. Packaging Catalog, Breskin, New York, 1929 and following
15. Henry J. Howlett, "The packaging associations', Modern Packaging, March 1952, pp. 160-5
16. and James O. Rice (ed.), Packaging Packing & Shipping: A Record of the Subjects as Developed through the American Management Association, Elliot, New York, 1936. The Du Pont Company was among the original sponsors of the AMA expositions and conventions on packaging
17. A good example was independent advertising consultant and commercial artist James Harley Nash, whose package for Du Pont's Five Star Antifreeze won the 1936 award for the top design in the American Management Association's Competition for Distinctive Merit in Packaging. Nash began his career in a lithographic establishment, then worked with an art service before running a lithograph brokerage and display service business. Then, before forming his own advertising business, he headed for seven years the Poster, Packaging and Display Department for one of New York's leading advertising agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. Rice, op. cit., pp. 26-7
18. Ralph Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869-1939, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 1939, p. 259
19. Ben Nash, in the view of design historian Arthur J. Pulos, 'did more than any other designer of his time to turn package design into a profession by fusing technological and merchandising practicalities with aesthetic and psychological values.' By 1935 Nash had thirty designers on his staff in New York City. See Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure 1940-1975, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1988, p. 280
20. See Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939, Temple, Philadelphia, 1979, pp. 40-2
21. Egmont Arens, 'Package design', Modern Packaging (March, 1952, pp. 152-9, discusses many early package designers. As has often been noted, many of the early designers in the US were born abroad
22. On Container Corporation of America, see Pulos, op. cit., pp. 280-3
23. See William Longyear, "The business of package design', Du Pont, Wilmington, DE, 1960
24. For the early history of cellophane, especially its research and development, see David A. Hounshell & John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902-1980, Cambridge, New York, 1988, pp. 120-1, 170-80
25. 'An opportunity for added candy profit in super markets with holiday promotions', Du Pont, Wilmington, DE, 1955
26. Du Pont Film Department, 'Candy package design project', n.p., n.d
27. Packages and People, 1937-72. The quotation is from p. 19 of the last issue, which appeared in December 1972
28. See W. T. Brown & J. L. Jeneman, 'Designing the eye-appealing package, reprint from Packages and People, Du Pont Film Department collection, Hagley Museum and Library
29. Longyear, op. cit
30. Carroll B. Larrabee, in his How to Package for Profit: A Manual of Packaging, Harper, New York, 1935, criticized 'the artist', who 'has insisted that packaging is purely a matter of design. He has not hesitated to express his withering contempt for the interfering client whose chief fault, it seems, is that he is interested in making money, and the short-sighted maker of materials and printers who, according to the artist, are not capable of translating dreams into printing-ink, cardboard, and tin.' In Larrabee's view, such designers often turned out packages of what he called 'the long-discredited Nude-Descending-a-Staircase school'. See pp. 1-2 of this work
31. See Strasser, op. cit, pp. 146-62
32. Parlin's work in creating the Commercial Research Division at Curtis is described in Ben Nash, Developing Marketable Products and Their Packaging, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1945, pp. 9-11
33. Ellen Mazur Thomson, '"The science of publicity": an American advertising theory, 1900-1920', Journal of Design History, vol. 9, no. 4, 1996, pp. 253-72 discusses the scientific pretensions of early advertisers
34. Parlin's early declaration of this article of faith is recounted in Nash, op. cit., p. 10
35. Strasser, op. cit., p. 161
36. See Louis Cheskin, Secrets of Marketing Success, Trident, New York, 1967
37. and J. Gordon Lippincott & Walter P. Margulies, 'Packaging in top-level planning', Harvard Business Review, September-October 1956, pp. 46-54
38. Pulos, op. cit, p. 280
39. This was the aforementioned pamphlet published by the Film Department of Du Pont in 1960, Edmund Faison's Package Research. For a view of packaging research two decades after the Faison piece, see Walter Stern (ed.), Handbook of Package Design Research, Wiley, New York, 1981
40. See Charles H. DeMirjian's undated memo on design-related research, DeMirjian Collection
41. Charles H. DeMirjian to the author, 2 June 1997
42. Interview with Irv Koons, 30 May 1997
43. For example, Nash wrote of food packaging that 'the chief consideration was not of the various food products that had to be packaged, distributed, and sold, but of the family dinner table, the pantry and kitchen, and particularly of women's shopping habits.' Cited in Pulos, op. cit, p. 280
44. Jeffrey Meikle makes this point. Meikle, op. cit., p. 42
45. Barry M. Katz, 'Technology and design: a new agenda', Technology and Culture, vol. 38, no. 2, April 1997, pp. 452-66
46. This review essay discusses Victor Margolin (ed.), Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1989
47. Richard Buchanan & Victor Margolin (eds.), Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1995
48. Victor Margolin & Richard Buchanan (eds.), The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1995
49. and Dennis P. Doordan (ed.), Design History: An Anthology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1995
50. These words are not Buchanan's but Barry Katz's in summary of Buchanan. Katz, op. cit., p. 460
51. 55 Katz, op. cit., pp. 460-1
52. Adrian Forty, particularly in the introduction and the conclusion of Objects of Desire: Design & Society from Wedgwood to IBM, Pantheon, New York, 1986, emphasizes the role of myths in shaping design
53. As an exasperated Los Angeles executive in a major advertising firm said, consumers 'are like roaches - you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.' The comment from the BBDO executive was quoted in the Wall Street Journal story headlined 'Marketers seek the "naked" truth in consumer psyches', 30 May 1997, p. B1
54. See, for example, Ewen, op. cit., and the same author's All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, Basic, New York, 1988
55. DeMirjian, 'The company package design director', p. 3, op. cit., DeMirjian Collection