Excerpt from a piece on packaging design
Design is an holistic discipline. Its practitioners take inspiration from the world around them and translate it into a visual and physical language whose complex syntax and texture can describe everything from a paperclip to a jet engine.
There are few accessible areas of design which more ably demonstrate its interdependence than the twin disciplines of product and packaging design.
Packaging as a conscious phenomenon in the West is something of a baby industry. It has been in existence for a little over a century in the form that we would recognise, and many of the terms which trip naturally from the tongue of any two-bit oily marketing exec – 'brand identity', 'brand loyalty', even 'advertising' – only gained real credence within the last hundred years, thanks to the introduction of packaged goods.
For it was only when manufacturers had the platform of their goods' packaging from which to promote themselves directly to the consumer that we began to see people buying specifically Quaker Oats rather than just a pound of any old oatmeal that the grocer happened to have a big sack of behind the counter. A grocer's stock list we know of from the early eighteenth century lists seventy items from almonds to vermicelli, but does not mention a single manufacturer's or brand name.
The impact that the practice of packaging goods had on the shopkeeper himself is difficult to understate. As soon as boxes allowed goods to pedal their own sales pitch (with a bias towards medals and seals of approval in the early days), the role of the sales assistant became increasingly marginalised; by 1965, roughly 95% of all grocery trade was self-service. Most evident in food packaging, manufacturers strove to create a bond of trust between them and their customer before they even set foot in the shop. It's an abstract bond, and one to which it took some time to adjust. Why take Coleman's word for it that their mustard is better than any other? Before goods were packed, you could ask questions of the shopkeeper and handle the goods themselves, making more abstruse still the link between the consumer and his now-packaged purchase.
Excerpt from the introduction to a feature on creative uses for a laser printer
Take a look at the dusty, unloved laser printer sitting in the corner of your office. If it’s a mono laser, the chances are that all you use it for is banging out letters and invoices, and even if it’s capable of producing colour output, most of us limit our creativity to the page layout application we use to put our work together.
With a little lateral thinking and a little experimentation, however, your laser printer is capable of producing some striking and unusual output, either by feeding exotic media through it, or by treating the page after it has dropped into the output tray.
In this feature, we’ll showcase a number of techniques whose sole purpose is to encourage you to think of your laser printer as an ally in your creative life rather than a servant. We’ll show you a few specific tricks that you can use to make your projects sparkle, a few which will help you create mock-ups to reduce the amount of imagination your clients will need to employ to visualise the final piece, and a handful that are just fun, but it’s important you realise that this is just a sampling of what you can achieve. Spend time trawling through the Internet or stationery catalogues to track down media that can fire your imagination.
Excerpt from a review of the world's first solid-ink MFD
Solid ink is a little used but very civilised system. In place of toner or liquid ink, blocks of what are effectively high-grade crayons are melted onto the page in fine dots.
Changing the ink is a joy. Under the scanner platen are four chutes into which you load coloured wax blocks; these are shaped in such a way as to make it impossible to fit the wrong colour to the wrong chute.
In fact, you don’t ‘change’ the ink at all; you simply keep it topped up by dropping in more wax blocks. There’s no downtime while toner cartridges are being swapped round. It’s a clean, simple system which has the added advantage of being environmentally friendly; it generates only a fortieth of the waste of a typical colour laser.
Solid ink is inherently forgiving in terms of media too. Because it lays down a layer of wax, it doesn’t really care whether it’s printing onto bright white 100gsm presentation stock or 80gsm recycled paper; colours remain consistent.
Installation was childishly simple; we had a mixed network of PCs and Macs using the system at a simple level in less then an hour – including unpacking – without even glancing at the manual. Drivers are held on the printer itself and can be installed onto client PCs and Macs just by typing the printer’s IP address into a browser and clicking the install link.
The documentation included with this device is excellent. A handy pack with a quick reference guide and PDF manuals on CD is included which can be attached to the side of the printer and there’s extensive help accessible from the printer’s control panel itself. Not only is on-screen help provided, but you can print out attractive and helpful printing, scanning and copying guides. These aren’t exhaustive, but are pitched perfectly to help typical users get to grips with these functions. Menu maps and configuration pages are also available, and at all levels we were struck by the level of thought which had been given to making these genuinely useful.
Excerpt from a Masterclass on setting up free, remote backup
