Japanese candy packaging is the best. Just look at this stupid thing. The type really sux, the illustration is really terrible, the color scheme is alien and the whole effect is utterly laughable. I have no idea where I found this package, or when. It could have been the 1980s—or just last year. I don’t know. Does it matter? Japanese packaging (especially candy packaging) is just so fucking cool.
What’s with that mouth? It’s vaguely homoerotic. What exactly is going on there? Who drew this? Didn’t they ever learn to draw? A “mint bomb”? Am I looking at a flavor explosion of some sort? Those colors are so weird. It’s like creatures from another time/space continuum stepped in and started talking to us in gibberish.
I DON’T GET IT! But I LIKE IT!
When contemporary Japanese graphic design first hit the American consciousness in the early 1980s, it came at a very peculiar time in our own graphic history. It was the tail end of the classic “corporate modern” era. The ’70s and all those dry, clean annual reports and abstract meaningless generic corporate logos were stumbling along, punch-drunk from their own success. Punk was barking at the door and everybody was still high on coke. Change was imminent.
When the first books of Japanese logo design were released stateside it was like a huge graphic design left hook to the body. It was a lightning bolt from another planet. Combined with the revival of old logo styles (collections of vintage logos, like Leslie Cabarga’s three-part history series of German trademark design, hit the bookstores cheap) and suddenly the old corporate logo look was staggering—a classic one-two punch, a technical knockout. Then the Duffy Design group started to explore a revival of the “illustrated” logo (with the enormous talents of then-employee Charles Spencer Anderson and his amazing influential work) and the American corporate graphic standard was down for the count. It was gone forever. DOA.
Those Japanese logos were astonishing to see in the early ’80s. It was all so weird—the Japanese letterforms were strange enough. For instance, they were “brush”-oriented, rather than “chiseled type”-oriented. Their traditions were brush and ink and their fluid letterform is essentially calligraphic in style.
Westerners, on the other hand, trace our style back to the letterform chiseled in stone. In fact, that’s where we get the serif. It was a basic “finish” stroke at the end of a long groove (letter body). The chisel was placed at the end and a quick smack with the hammer and it was a nice clean finish. It looked cleaner if you allowed the chisel to nudge over the edge a little, and helped to define the stroke in your mind’s eye. Thus, the “serif.” When they apply a “serif” to a traditional Japanese letter design, it’s so completely wrong that it’s shocking and cool. Nobody ever thought of that before, yet it makes perfect sense.
When the Japanese designers did logos for their market in “American type,” that’s what blew our minds. It was so WRONG! Yet it looked so dang COOL!
One of the most fascinating things to me about Japanese culture is their skill at adopting the look and styles and ideas of other cultures and “Japanifying” them. For instance, their calligraphy is essentially Chinese in origin, but their idea of a simplified alphabet was adopted from the West. Neither aspect is entirely Japanese, but when they use it becomes essentially theirs.
So, when they start to use American graphic forms, they do it “their” way. This often results in ways we would never have thought of in a million years. Look at that “Super Mint” typography. Slamming the letterforms together is an idea we’ve all used. Making one line start with larger letterforms and having them decrease in size to create a false sense of motion or “broadcast” is also a Design 101 concept, tried by every design student in America. But the idea of having them ride level across the baseline (as in “mint”) across the top edge to indicate an explosive force is totally weird. I’ve never seen anything like that. I would have NEVER thought of that touch. Totally dented and absurd and stupid. It works out great, though.
The same goes for the utterly peculiar color scheme. It’s not distinctly a Japanese color palette, but I doubt anybody in America would naturally come up with that. It’s too delicate and controlled. It’s awful. But so cool! Just like mint!
And the drawings—so “Japanese.” Their traditions of drawing never went the course of the sculpted modeling or European painterly imagery. It relied so heavily on brush and ink that they drew predominantly upon the outline “cartoon” form. When their popular culture art first arrived in Europe (wrapping early Japanese “china”) it was one of the reasons for the development of Expressionism. Nobody had ever thought that way in European art before. The eventual end result in Japan is an entire culture of cartoon artists. So many forms of imaging in Japan are based on the cartoon form. It’s weird and plastic and so, so cool.
