JKR

The design of the egg box above certainly looks lovely. It brings to mind the great book on Japanese traditional packaging ‘How to Wrap Five Eggs’. But I think it has an obvious flaw – one imagines the eggs themselves won’t survive too long in this construct.

“My goal was to design an innovative package using a small amount of material. It’s made of natural microwaved carton and consists of one piece. The eggs placed into ellipse-shaped cuts. The consumer can get the eggs by the turning of topside.”
Explained the designer on The Dieline who described the packaging as ‘simple yet beautiful’.

Unilever produced a great document a few years back setting out their sustainability agenda for packaging. It contained their definition of what packaging actually is. The number one purpose of packaging, they said, was to protect the contents. Above weight or choice of materials. Because if the contents don’t survive then the whole thing is very ungreen (amongst other things). This might be stating the obvious, but then one still can find occasional examples where this simple principle is not delivered.

Clearly beautiful packaging can be admired in its own right. But in an ideal world, beauty should never leave the drawing board without pragmatism or vice versa.