Day 4 the Closeted Packaging Nerd

I have a little creative obsession that I am tired of hiding away:

I love packaging design, especially Asian packaging design. When we travel, I can wander through a supermarket the way other people wander through a gallery. Food is nice, but that is not the reason.

On these excursions, I feel like I get to glimpse someone else’s culture, their fantasies and desires. Especially sweet products are meant to be enticing, to seduce us into indulgence. Nobody needs candy.

For a long time I mostly kept those thoughts to myself. Isn’t packaging trivial? Something we glance at, buy, and then immediately throw away again? Valuing packaging as a medium is like being the person who keeps all the wrapping paper from her gifts on Christmas Eve. Silly, and a bit of a hoarder.

So, in order to look a little less crazy, I just photographed the packaging that I found particularly funny or intriguing. That way nobody would know this silly little secret of mine, unless they went through the thousands of photos on my phone.

This year, studying product design, I am asked to show my creative process, to let the professors see how my mind works. Terrifying, I know! But it got me thinking: if I was to honestly share my process, shouldn’t this be a real part of it?

So I made a change to my approach. I took what was meant to become a photo album and started sticking in all the fun packaging samples that I find. I know this is just the first of many such albums.

It is strange—once I made peace with this thing about me, I became kind of proud of it. Yes, I do pay attention to something many others may overlook, and I also believe that doing so directly contributes to my design thinking.

If you are also a closeted packaging nerd, please join me! Make your own album, your scrapbook of consumer products. You can share it or not, but these obsessions deserve to be taken seriously.

I hope you’re well, wherever you are
Celine