New Cereal in Old Boxes

If nothing happens to grab your attention while you’re passing through the cereal aisle at your grocery store, it’s certainly not from lack of trying.  It seems these days that cereal boxes keep getting more and more ostentatious in an effort to grab the attention of easily distracted youngsters.  On the other hand, the contents of the cereal boxes themselves haven’t really changed a whole lot over the years, and a lot of the brands of cereal we have on the shelf today happen to be the very same brands that our parents ate while they watched Saturday morning cartoons back when they were kids.  Perhaps in an effort to stand out by bringing back memories of a simpler time, General Mills has recently started putting a number of their most popular cereals in throwback packaging.

These two packages go quite a ways back.  Based on looking at vintage cereal box pictures found on this site, I’d say that the design on the Wheaties box is probably somewhere in the late Forties to early Fifties, hearkening back to a day before they started using pictures of real athletes.  I wasn’t able to find an example of the design on which the Kix box was based, but if I had to guess, I’d say they used a very early design, perhaps  even from the Thirties or Forties.  (Kix was first introduced in 1937, and was in fact the first example of the now popular “puffed” style of cereal to be introduced.)

The designs on the Lucky Charms and Golden Grahams boxes are somewhat newer,  Golden Grahams cereal was first introduced in the Seventies, and the very Seventies looking design on the package (which survived largely unchanged well into the Eighties) reflects this.  In fact, the rather more generic packaging used for Golden Grahams these days kind of tends to get lost on the shelf As for the Lucky Charms box, that particular design seems to have been used through the late Seventies and early Eighties (Here is a picture that shows this box design with an offer for Star Wars stickers, and another one on the site shows a similar design with Battlestar Galactica stickers as well.)  Interestingly enough, there are some subtle changes to the Lucky Charms box.  The picture of the cereal on the box reflects the current lineup of  marshmallows, which is far more diverse than the three or four shapes that the cereal had back when this box design was current.   The text has also changed somewhat, so that the modern box reads “frosted toasted oat cereal with marshmallow bits”, where the old box reads “Sugar frosted oat cereal with marshmallow bits” (although the word “sugar” was later eliminated on the older boxes as well.)   Currently there is also a vintage box in this style for Honey Nut Cheerios as well, but I don’t have a picture of that one right now, and to be honest, the packaging of that particular cereal has changed surprisingly little between now and then.

As you’ve probably noted from the pictures, General Mills is currently offering a set of T-shirts at this website in conjunction with these throwback boxes.  Unlike the T-shirts offered in some promotions, the ones from this one actually look like the type of thing that a sane person might actually wear out in public.  I suspect you could probably even find similar tees in one of those goth-infested pop culture outlets at your neighborhood mall, at a significantly higher price than the $5 (plus shipping and handling, of course) that these ones are being sold for.  In fact, there’s just one tiny little problem with the T-shirt offers…

 

It seems that when someone copied the front of the box onto the design used for the back of the box, they didn’t bother to remove the T-shirt offer.  I guess I can see their point though.  Looking through the cereal box archive linked above, it is  surprisingly difficult to find a cereal box of any vintage that doesn’t have one special offer or another plastered on the front of the box.  I guess this means they’re just keeping with tradition, right? 

Can’t Wait Until Casual Friday?

“Gentlemen, since 1986 we’ve been selling khaki pants all around the world, and they remain as popular as ever.  Still, I can’t seem to shake this nagging suspicion that the whole thing is getting a little… well… boring.  We need something new, something fresh, something - Yes Johnson?”

“Why don’t we try making khakis out of denim?”

“Why, that’s a BRILLIANT idea!  Levi Strauss himself would be complimenting you on your ingenuity if he were here now.  I wonder why nobody has thought of such a thing before…”

You’d fall for it too

At a Papa Murphy’s Take and Bake pizza near here the other day, I found this bit of decoration on the floor:

Of course, the point they’re trying to get across with this is pretty clear, and even if it wasn’t, they’ve conveniently provided a sign to explain it.  Let’s try to figure this whole thing out:

•  Apparently the floor of this particular establishment is unable to bear the weight of an average person when it is combined with the weight of one of the pizzas which is sold here.  This leads to one of two conclusions:  Either the floor of this establishment is woefully inadequate for the purpose it was designed for (in which case, a building inspector would probably have a field day with all the code violations they could presumably find here) or the mass of the pizza in question exceeds the load bearing capacity of the floor.  Although the impression that they would like to present suggests the latter, the nature of the damage to the floor, combined with the unusually wide spacing between the floor joists seems to suggest the former scenario is far more likely.
• In spite of the fact that I have never seen one of these places in anything besides a single-story building, it seems that this particular location happens to have an unfinished basement underneath it, unbeknownst to any of the customers until one of them found himself crashing through the floor in a freak pizza-hauling accident. 
• Speaking of our hapless victim, through some miracle he appears to have emerged from this ordeal surprisingly unscathed, as has the product he was carrying at the time of the accident in question.  Given the fact that the figure depicted on the warning sign placed next to the hole (where it does absolutely nothing to prevent an unwary passerby from falling in) has apparently been flattened by one of these freakishly huge pizzas, this is especially miraculous.
• Finally, in spite of all this, nobody in this particular establishment seems to have bothered doing anything to either assist him in getting out of the hole or contacing emergency services.  For all we know, he’ll be stuck down there for days, trying in vain to get someone to bring a ladder and surviving on unbaked Chicago Style Stuffed Crust pizza.

Anyone care to count how many potential lawsuits this little vignette contains?

Designers Who Don’t Get It - Part 1

One of the things I see a lot of in the course of my wanderings is bad and/or questionable design.  In a lot of  cases, it can’t be helped (this is usually because there’s some perpetually clueless manager out there running the show and telling them what to do.)  On the other hand, there are times when it’s clear that someone is overpaid and out of touch with reality, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.  As I see examples of this on a regular basis, I plan to make occasional posts chronicling these examples of questionable design.

 First up, we have a promotional display for the line of PGA Tour licensed apparel made by Perry Ellis and sold at JCPenney.  See if you can spot what’s wrong with this picture:

…But not good enough to keep the approach shot out of the bunker, it would seem.  Here it’s also interesting to note that in spite of the PGA Tour branding used for these items, most of the items in the line do not actually have any visible PGA branding, which is rather unusual for licensed items.  Given the fact that few of us aspire to play golf professionally (or in my case, adequately) I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Second, we have this, seen in the window of MNG by Mango, another of the many interchangable and seriously overpriced womens’ fashion stores at Bellevue Square:

Call me crazy, but I don’t forsee this becoming the hottest new fashion trend anytime soon.  They already tried this style (or something resembling it)  with Catholic Rosaries back in the Middle Ages, but the people responsible for that particulat example were more interested in punishing people who fell asleep in church than they were in following the latest fashion trends.  As long as we’re on the subject of bad design, this particular store’s website   provides a textbook example of mystery meat navigation, and a CPU-melting full screen Flash UI.  I’ve got to give them a couple points back for the Roomba in the corner though, even though it might have just been left over in the backroom from the Brookstone store which used to occupy this particular space in the mall.

Finally, we come to this display in the window of the mall’s Puma store, representin’ the old school and not doing a particularly good job of it::

I’m not even sure where to start with this one.  First of all, the TVs look exceptionally fake, almost as if some designer Googled for pictures of old TVs, couldn’t quite figure out how they worked, and decided that the knob on the front was there just for decoration. The “rabbit ears” in the back are made of clear plastic, and look a whole lot less convincing in real life than they might seem from this picture (and if you were watching Yo! MTV Raps in the first place, you’d have cable and wouldn’t need to use the TV’s antenna anyway, unless you were bumming videotapes off your friends.)  What’s even more puzzling, however, is the “TV” on top, which is displaying a video loop on what appears to be about a 6″ LCD screen embedded in the middle of the fake TV.  Not only that, but what appears to be the controls for this LCD are embedded in the middle of the TV screen as well.  I don’t remember ever having a TV with the controls in the middle of the screen, do you?

More examples of questionable design as I find and collect them.  I suspect it shouldn’t take long…