Shelf Life

Rating:
Summary: A book pak-kidge
Review:
Clearly a book for all package designers' bookshelves and as it is rather nicely designed and printed the rest of us could well keep it somewhere. The foibles of the English language make an obvious trap for the unwary foreign brand-manager, why is a French butter called Noisy or a Dutch beer called Slag? Of course many of these products just use the language of the country (like a Polish sugar called Wars) that is spelt the same but has an entirely different meaning in English.

The book does look rather good though. The 113 packages are displayed mostly one to a page (with perhaps just a bit too much white space surrounding them) the page numbers are created from those little sticker price tags and the index is a handsome spread with a small square photo section of each package. If I have a criticism it is that turning the tiny type captions sideways in the top left corner of each spread makes them awkwardly unreadable.

So, a fun title for creative professionals who can ponder on why a Ugandan body spray (page 129) is called Prison.