Watching my six-year-old son as he unpacked his birthday present the other day, it struck me how this simple event contained all the ingredients needed for a winning package design, but that it also represented many major environmental pitfalls. It was a highly emotional experience shaped by desire, restlessness, excitement, elation, emotion, joy, and possession. Packaging embodiessuch magic and fascination. Its central element is the pleasure of the conquest; all formal, functional, and aesthetic qualities cannot compete with this notion of the pleasure associated with the unpacking experience, which reaches its ultimate climax in the attainment of the object of desire.The excess of colored papers and ribbons, which exercised so much fascination and excitement only a few seconds earlier, lose all their appeal in an instant and are then thrown away in a pile of unwanted debris. ...

Packaging is the face of a product. It not only gives a product its visual identity, but can also determine where that product is placed on a crowded store shelf and can be the crucial factor in determining our decision to buy. Over the last few years, however, the understanding of the role of packaging has changed.In the past, packaging was thought of as an extension of the product's print advertising campaign-as a mere projection screen for established Iogos and brand messages. Today, packaging is considered to be a self-contained facet of an overall communication concept.

Boxed and Labelled Two!is a compelling exploration of the power of state-of-the-art packaging design today and documents its main strategic directions-all of which address a longing for "truthfulness." In addition,the book also features insightful texts by Sylvaln Allard,a professor of graphic design at the Universitd du Quebec in Montreal.