CapsuleBlog

Capsule's Brian Adducci on the Dieline blog

Hop on over to the world's #1 packaging design blog to check out our creative principal's column on experience design and packaging.

Flickr fun on Friday

For the photography fans:

You can now upload images to www.tiltshiftmaker.com and tinker with them to create a miniature world of your own.

Image by: aha42 on Flickr

Earth Day - sustainable packaging news

In honor of Earth Day, let's take a look at the Frito-Lay fully compostable Sunchips bag made from plant-based materials.

Frito-Lay introduced a significant rebranding earlier this year after researching women's attitudes and emotions around snacking. While it was found that women snack more than men, they are not choosing Frito-Lay products as their snacks. New packaging, flavors and an ad campaign have been introduced in an effort to sway women away from their celery sticks and/or brownies. (Frito-Lay research found that women snack 14 percent of the time on salty foods. They snack 25 percent of the time on sweet foods; the other 61 percent of snacking includes drinks, fruits and vegetables. Oprah would be proud.)

Sunchips has been one of the company's best-selling products, and it's also the focus for a pretty revolutionary packaging concept. I aplaud Frito-Lay for this innovation, set to launch next year. Good stuff. Hopefully they'll be the leaders of an entirely new movement.

Twitter twitter everywhere?

Is it just me or has Twitter truly become a behemoth in the past month? Before now it was just something that a random person here or there used - I'd see a link to a Twitter account on a blog, or Facebook, and think hmmm, now this Twitter thing I am not understanding - why so enamored? And now, Ashton Kutcher has a million followers (if you haven't heard that, where have you been?), Britney supposedly tweets while on tour, Oprah just accidentally screamed in all caps in her first tweet, and every corporation and its dog has an account that is used to "engage" consumers.

I would kill to own a crystal ball now... will Twitter reach Facebook status? Has anyone actually ever won new business because of it? Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I'm just having a hard time.

Eco font

Some smart people have devised a way to use 20% less ink - a typeface with tiny holes in it! They aren't visible at 12 point or less.

Check it out and download for free here.

From the website -

`The picture illustrates how the Ecofont was created by omitting parts of the letter. At the shown size, this obviously is not very nice, but at a regular font size it is actually very usable. Naturally, the results vary depending on your software and the quality of your screen. The Ecofont works best in OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.'

Naming you is hard to do...

I have a confession to make: Naming is one of the key parts of what we do at Capsule, yet I struggle with it. Product, company or program, it's all the same.

Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love analyzing a brand, searching through its attributes for clues, digging into metaphors and semiotics - it's a lot like being a brand archeologist of sorts. The process of getting at a brand's essence, and figuring out an original, effective and striking way of conveying its story and its promise through a name really is absolutely fascinating.

There are two downers, though, and they're pretty significant.

The most obvious is that of protectability. Chances are, for every idea that I think is brilliant, someone else out there has already thought of it. And they've most probably trademarked it (or, if they haven't, they're actively using it and therefore rendering it unusable for everyone else).

The other roadblock can be the client themselves, particularly when you are renaming a company. This can become necessary for a multitude of reasons: mergers, buy outs, or simply discovering that the name a client has been using is not protectable, not appropriate anymore, or just... not good.

This is when we have to meld into the role of the therapist, coaching the client through the process of change and making it as painless and even pleasant as possible. Conducting market research can most certainly provide the ammunition needed to convince the client that the change is needed. For some, it really is as sensitive and personal an issue as deciding what to name your own baby would be.

Often people fall into the trap of believing that the PERFECT name is out there just waiting to be plucked from somebody’s brain - a name that succinctly references everything the company ever was, is, hopes to be. Not possible, people. You just can't expect a mere name to perform too much. A name never exists in a vacuum - it will live out there in the world, always in a context of some kind. It's up to you to build the brand and the name will take on a life of its own.

Our philosophy when naming is to strike the perfect balance between suggestion, intrigue, descriptiveness and the "X factor". One of my favorite success stories is Prairiestone.

Byerly’s and Lunds were making a big push to have pharmacies in all twenty-six Lunds and Byerly’s locations. Their current partner was not interested in making the investment, but they found three risk takers who were more than willing. Each founder represented a leg of the stool required to support the retail business they were looking to build. One is a pharmacist, one a business manager and the third a marketing manager, all three core skills required.

Capsule was asked to help define the brand these three founders were intending to create, name it, design an identity and then help them sell it to the Lund Food Holdings management team. The timeline was extraordinarily tight with the first objective to have the business up, running and working profitable in 4 months.

“What we have been repeatedly impressed by is just how well they brought our many brand intentions together into a name that resonates with a wide array of customers, employees and business partners. Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t say, “What a perfect name...”

We were recently giving a tour to business people from out of town and they commented on how well we had done our brand work. From a name that reflected our Midwestern values, to an identity that appealed to our audiences, to a beautiful mix of passion and intellectual depth telling the customer that we offered something new and exciting.”

[Lew Zeidner, PrairieStone Pharmacy Founding Partner]

Capsule wins!

File this in the Shameless Self-Promotion category, please!

Capsule won several awards at the recent AIGA MN Design Show. Our Duet Series invitation won:

As did our Design Matters: Packaging book, the Double Cross Vodka Bottle, Simple Seed packaging.

Tropicana lost 20% in sales with redesign

Adage today wrote about the sales figures that equaled doom for the new packaging design. When the new packaging was released, unit sales dropped by 20 per cent in around 6 weeks.

The kicker for me was that 19 per cent of dollar sales for Tropicana - this is orange juice, people, not toilet paper - cost the company "tens of millions". Who's buying all of this orange juice?!

It's fairly unusual for a company to pull the plug on new package design so quickly, and so when the dump was announced (I blogged about it here) there was much speculation as to why. Obviously, it all boils down to numbers.

It makes me really curious about the Pepsi cola redesign (blogged here) and the effect that it must have had on sales. This redesign set the design world on fire with controversy. It got a very lukewarm response from the Capsule designers, to put it politely. And yet for it not to be pulled in the same way as Tropicana was, it must be selling relatively well. Or, there are some stubborn people in charge of the brand.

Does anyone know any more about this?