Thinking outside the box

There are a billion cookbooks. Launching yet another without a celebrity chef lure is stacking the odds against any publisher. So before the Gerstenberg Publishing House produced The Real Cookbook in 2013, it asked integrated design and innovations agency, Korefe, for ideas. And that is how the world got its first and only cookbook that you can read, cook and eat. Each page of the book is a sheet of pasta that spells out step by step instructions for a classic lasagne. Home cooks fill, stack and cook the lasagne pages. 

Later in the year, and perhaps proving that nobody gets it right all the time, Korefe also created the cheese pencil for food brand, Deli Garage. Each cheese, and there are three flavours – pesto, truffles and chilli – looks exactly like a pencil and the cheese is shaved with a pencil sharpener to produce ribbons. The packaging includes a portion measure and a calorie counter for portion control.

Postler Ferguson is a London design studio whose packaging ideas are never ordinary. Some are extraordinarily clever. Its fresh fish pack is one of the latter. When supermarkets began to introduce more sustainable and cheaper fish into their offerings they hit two obstacles. Customers are not wildly enthusiastic about trying unfamiliar species, and some of them are particularly ugly. Postler Ferguson's solution was to place the fish in an appealing, interesting and easily recognisable package at fresh fish counters. The tubular packs are constructed from a double-layered polyethylene. They are airtight, resealable and can be filled with ice for transport to keep fish fresh until it is cooked. 

If you are a packaging design lover, jump onto Luksemburk’s website for a thrill. When you tear yourself away from its array of fascinating packaging ideas on the wild side, you’ll find this statement, “My name is Luks Piekut and Luksemburk is the creative land where I realize projects from the area of culture, art, design and fashion. The final projects are environmentally friendly, especially for the wine environment - I am wine lover.” Piekut has done rather well from playing with the wine he loves. After he created, Pink Glasses, a concept label for a Californian rosé wine  based on the idea that the world needs to be seen through rosé coloured glasses, the design world began to notice him. And a deluge of awards landed in his lap. That led to rather a lot of new work, including a wine label project for Locus Ameno, a wine producer from the epicentre of wine establishment, Provence in France. The brief was to underscore the fresh and light characteristics of the wine – and to complete the project inside a month. Piekut achieved both.