Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.
So I’m just gonna cut right to the chase and just say this is a truly awful piece of packaging. And not one day after we published Rudy’s piece on plastic cans, I spotted the US Open Moët canned RTD that comes in what is essentially a tennis ball can. Now, I know what you’re asking - how many people are going to the US Open IRL and buying this. Let’s say they sell 1,000 of these things; ultimately, it’s a mere drop in the landfill bucket. I wouldn’t exactly disagree with you on quantity and its ultimate impact on plastic waste. However, plenty of marketers out there believe this genuinely qualifies as innovation. And the more brands (and LinkedIn “thought” warriors) that gush over companies that use a Franken-Can, the more likely it is that you will see them with a fair amount of regularity at your local liquor store. Again, you are being willfully shitty by packaging a beverage in one of these, and it should always be called out every single time. It is not a breath of fresh branding air. It’s a plastic bottle with a metal top that can’t be recycled.
Huzzah! Taco Bell has brought back the Beefy Crunch Burrito. Don’t worry, there’s no lettuce on that one.
Most likely, I’ll never know what it’s like to eat at Carbone, but I can always try to get one of these Carbone x Malin-Goetz tomato candles. I’m joshin! I would never buy a $205 candle. Just don’t ask me how much I would be willing to pay to eat at Carbone...
Fred Hart is a very, very, very good boy, and he just dropped his SuperZoo recap, with 20 pieces of pup-fueled packaging.
One of yesterday’s salad readers pointed out that I had linked a FastCo piece that was paywalled, and they wanted some ol’ fashioned colorful couch porn. So I present you with the following thirst trap from the 1989 IKEA catalog:
Dogfish Head’s Gourd mugs are back for another year, and they tapped Dylan Goldberger for the illustrations.
A Hello Kitty x Godzilla mash-up Happy Meal is actually kinda cool.
Mayah ditches the usual boring soft pink-and-blue expectant-mom branding for something colorful and joyful. Looks great!
I don’t need to be the king of the world.
-Bill