Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Trademarks were necessary for promoting the leading brands—
and some not-so-famous ones, too. The Gillette Blue Blade company
invested all its equity in a simple package, colored in two shades of blue
with a stark black-and-white photograph of the founder, Englishman King
C. Gillette (captioned with his signature). This remained the company’s
design for well over fifty years. For the Italian product Tre Teste, three
look-alike, stylishly coifed female heads float above the brand name.
Souplex, a German product, features the happy, well-fed face of a burgher
mortised inside a circle. One brand even used a topsy-turvy head as a
mascot—turn it one way he is unshaven; turn the other way and the face is
clean as a baby’s behind.
Blade wrappers range from commercially sophisticated to
amateurishly naïve. A case in point is the Hamburg Ring Blade (made in
Germany), featuring a distortedly drawn ocean vessel heading on a collision
course with a life preserver that bears the brand name. By current standards
this, and indeed all the specimens from this timeframe, are quaint. Today,
packages have scant personality but a lot of marketing surveys to back them
up. Many fewer products are on the market, while those that remain have
heaps of high-visibility brand recognition. These vintage wrappers and
displays are not, however, simply nostalgic artifacts; they are remnants from
a time when a recognizable package design could shave a few customers off
the competition.