Addressing new ways in which people function day to day is a process of reprogramming people and their need for convenience. There are thousands of convenient mini products in our shops and markets – like these honey packages – and often it appears that there is more package than product.

Capilano’s Snap’n Squeeze product offer of 12 x 7g packaged units, packaged in an 85g bag for 84g net (total amount of product) of honey, is one of these offers. For one 400g jar of “easy squeeze” Capilano honey, one needs 4.8 bags of Snap’n Squeeze sachets. Or in price terms a $4 jar for 4.8 x $3 bags ($14.40) of the same NET amount of product. Or in terms of waste 1 jar, 1 seal wrapper, 1 lid, compared to 54 spent sachets and 5 bags.

Designers are well positioned to query such products and encourage clients and consumers to adopt less wasteful ways to package, purchase, handle and consume products.

If foods need special conditions to handle them, is it not more satisfying to wait and be rewarded when conditions are right?

Isn’t living all about learning how deal with with foods that have skins, piths, pips, that drip, dribble, leak and stick?

This brand for the National Parks & Wildlife Service NSW, Australia, has been like this for over thirty years at least, may it be around in its current state for at least another thirty, sixty years. The quirky chevron, the line work, authentic graphic boomerang, the punctuation, solid orange and black, and Lyre Bird in full display – it makes for a graphic design experience that is unique, graphic, distinctive, a commercial brand and no sign of the tools or technology that rendered it. Redesign, refresh, evolve, revolve at your own risk – screen print it big, on a charcoal, orange, or biege t-shirt anyday.

After 21 years Hulsbosch Design recastes the Woolworths brand into the future of the retail grocery sector. The incumbent brand – a matter-of-fact / confident graphic, gives way to an eye catching form of curves, swooshes and gradations, made easy with the functionality of the latest graphic software packages. The new Woolworths brand is an execution that brings into the fore the quest of many modern brands to be complex outcomes – where each solution often houses a suite of creative treatments. Many new brands have a symbol or motif, an abstract marketing concept or story, a custom type treatment, a strong design composition and or a complex colour palette wrapped into one outcome.

In such a time there seems to an opportunity for modern brand designers to develop outcomes that are simple and inviting, backed up with confident and intelligent presentation. The downside of a refined approach and with many brands adopting complex solutions it must be very tempting for client’s to get carried away with all the twinkle, flicker and kapow of playfully rendered outcomes.

The test for the new brand will be time itself. Does it have the stuff to be around in 21 years – 2029, as achieved by the previous design?

Congratulations to the incumbent designers of the Woolworths brand who put in place a graphic identity that worked for an impressive stretch of time.

Visit Hulsbosch Design here

The 2008 Melbourne Dream festival is an initiative of the National Australia Bank or the NAB. The festival has a distinctive image that has all the signs of being an underground cultural campaign. Yet what makes the concept seems more like a sophisticated marketing programme, (than a spirited cunning cultural campaign), is the budget it has available to run a small space ad campaign Melbourne’s largest tabloid paper – The Herald Sun; the frequency prime time television commercials spots and these slick stick up posters (a street poster site has been painted out with white paint and then the finely cut out photocopies applied).

If one visits the website this festival doesn’t seem to have a curator, or an artistic director, or a graphic design outfit for that matter (with such a distinctive campaign under their belt) not willingly crediting their unique output. Many questions come to mind querying this process. One has no issue with corporate companies getting involved in their own cultural programmes. One sees in this instance the cache that the word ‘festival’ brings to an event. One also sees that the act of a festival that credits the team behind the project is an act that assigns an event with cultural credentials.  The simple act of crediting the creative team behind the project – the curators, artist directors, producers, the sponsors and even the lowly graphic designer underwrites the integrity of the cultural product on offer to the public and potential audiences.

All said, the people who developed the graphic work behind this campaign deserve a mention. The graphic in not a new idea, never-the-less the overall effect is very distinctive and intriguing. The irony is hidden with this sample of stick up images. If one pays attention to the act that this campaign covered up, the poster painted over promotes the latest series, the third series, of the Mighty Boosh (one of the UK’s most original and dream like comedy exports), a draw card act worthy of any Dream Festival.

Visit the Dream Festival here. Visit the Mighty Boosh here.