When given this assignment, I started thinking about food labeling and wanted to see how often packaging is reflective of what's inside.
The truth of it is that containers aren't really designed to align with the food they hold. Think of the foam trays that meat is available in- usually pale pink or white. In all fairness, those can both be "meat colors," but they seem more arbitrary than anything. Same thing goes for all kinds of stuff- peanut butter in red jars, pasta and graham crackers in blue boxes, Nutella in white, sugar in pink, and so on.
There were a few products whose color was linked to the color of the packaging like sea salt in a pale blue container or corn starch in a yellow jar, but many more where the color of the packaging was linked to the "idea" of the product. So rather than a bag of murky blue-black corn chips being the same color, the bag had a lot of subdued earth tones and little bit of blue. A box of whole-grain Matzah (a cracker-like flat bread) is all neutrals and light browns and the colors on a tube of oatmeal are subdued and earthy-feeling. There are also a lot of cereals that are sticky-sweet with sugar and corn syrup and bright marshmallows that have very colorful, eye-catching boxes.
The above picture was taken just for the hell of it. I gathered some of the most colorful things I could find in my room and threw them on a table and just let things happen to see what sort of combinations they would make.
No comments:
Post a Comment