Less is so much more.

Design. So underrated, so essential to any enterprise gaining the upper hand.
I recently watched a documentary about the birth and development of the Spitfire. We all know the classic beauty in those elliptical wings and acknowledge the power of its Merlin engine, but it is the success in the job for which in was designed a fast, maneuverable killing machine that is responsible for its place in our history. Yet the design approach that was totally contradictory to the RAF specified standards of the day.
Today, Apple is perhaps the closest big name equivalent of such of design discipline, knocking Google off the top brand spot, but with a little less cordite involved.
Dedicated to performance, the Apple production line streamlines its outer shell in the same way that RJ Mitchell used his smooth Spitfire skin to hold the internal structure. Engine and body as one.
So focused are the people at Apple they eschew any semblance of design frippery and pare their product – and make a big note of this design folk – and their packaging to mere white box carriers. Of course like their hardware, an Apple white box is not the run of the mill carton board, every fold, crease,tuck and corner is precision engineered as befits its contents. Carriers that rarely get thrown away.
This minimalism is a conscious brand decision, but such economy of effort is lost on virtually every other packaged brand in the world, where the product is the product and its carrier . . . well, that looks like someone else had a go.
It most cases that is the exact case study and a continuing spiraling problem. Packaging even in these techno-sophisicated times still plays the stooge, where at best, it stands up for the ‘the pack shot’ – useful to stick up at the end of an Ad. and at worst the brash ‘on-shelf-promoter’ – a concoction of symbols, images, colours messages, noise and emotions, designed to tempt the consumer. Designed, shamefully by ‘Packaging designers’, who seem hell bent on continuing a gift-box tradition that started 150 years ago.
Apple have proved this 19th century approach to packaging is well and truly part of yesterday.
The likes of M&S go someway to reducing their food packaging but no major multiple has taken what is surely an inevitable step of stripping the veneer of graphic design completely from their offer.
When I was a kid Sainsbury’s cut, patted and packed your butter and bacon in front of you. It was wrapped in greaseproof paper for practical reasons and handed over. Not a dash of ink in sight. Was the food less fresh? Was the service less personal? Was the purchase less transportable? Not a bit of it. You bought the product not a dustbin full of superfluous packaging.
The Supermarkets contribution to such sufficiency today? To charge you for a plastic bag . . . a necessity they have created to deal with the volume of unwanted card and plastic. A flawed design approach and readily stoked by a flawed design industry.
Yes in a world of multi-brands we need to identify one from another but it no longer requires the complexity of six sided packaging design.
On-line shopping has the luxury of light, movement and a fraction of energy to function. It no longer requires scale or format for packaging, merely recognition.
And of course the easiest things to recognise are the simplest. Coke is the biggest grocery brand in the world – it uses two colours. National flags have signalled their countries difference for generations and not a word in sight. The App has become the reinvigorator of iconography and proves that the brand identity must work on a 5 mm square.
Form forced by its function.
When are the packaged brands going to wake up.