Sometimes words aren’t enough, and that’s where emojis come in. But even then, there are times you just can’t find the perfect little pictograph that encapsulates your exact mood. Even the slightly more expressive kaomoji can fail you when you need them most.
So why not build your own? Like an emoji that captures what it feels like to read the latest Trump news, or the rage that bubbles in your blood when the MTA says it’s raising fares. Well, Stripe designer Philipp Antoni has you covered.
Antoni’s Emoji Builder website lets you create your own custom emoji from the ground up. You can choose from a collection of face types, eyes, mouths, and accessories, and you can tweak the size and position of each individual part. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, you can hit the randomize button to see what Frankenstein emoji comes to life. The website also handily names your masterpiece based on everything you selected.
For instance, this little guy is currently the best representation of my inner soul. It’s called “crying thinking face with open eye and rolling eye and tongue sticking out and glasses and hugging hand.”
The rest of the Gizmodo staff also had a swell time creating custom emoji to describe various Big Moods, like this fictional representation of Deputy Editor Mario Aguilar eating IHOP’s Grinch pancakes.
Or take a look at this fanciful depiction of Mark Zuckerberg being unable to stop the verbal vomit spewing from his mouth.
Also, this blushing doofus was slipped into my direct messages over Slack and let me tell you, I almost choked on my water.
Overall, it turns out we’re very fond of the vomiting emoji face. I’m not really sure what that says about us, but feel free to share your own creations in the comments.
Tide just announced a new alternative to the classic bottle of laundry detergent. It basically looks and works just like a box of wine, which is sort of funny because of that whole meme about teens eating Tide Pods. But the new Tide Eco-Box is no joke. It’s actually a glimpse into a future where Amazon is dictating what our stuff looks like.
The new box of Tide is specifically designed to play nice with e-commerce. Sure, it’s good for the environment, too. But this streamlined, easy-to-ship box makes it easier for Amazon and friends to sell detergent out of their giant warehouses. One Proctor and Gamble brand manager Isaac Hellemn said in a press release, “The Tide Eco-Box is designed to keep the convenience of online shopping for the consumer but reduce the overall impact of that convenience on our environment.” The release goes on to detail how the Tide box can be shipped without a secondary box or bubblewrap, is lighter than plastic bottles, contains less water than regular Tide, and takes up less space on delivery trucks.
Few would argue that environmentally conscious packaging is not a great thing. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that shipping more goods means that we ought to make it easier on the workers who are taking care of that last mile. But when you step back and look at products like the Tide Eco-Box, you also have to wonder if companies like P&G are designing these things for the environment and the consumer and not just the Amazon overlords who stand to profit by streamlining logistics. That box of laundry detergent might weigh less and contain less plastic than a bottle, but that’s not exactly making the consumer’s life better. It is making it easier and cheaper for Amazon to ship.
Think about it this way: Laundry is a messy job. We all know how gross and slimy a bottle of Tide can get from everyday use. Imagine what one little spill would do to those cardboard legs. And think about how slippery that twisting nozzle gets after you’ve poured a dozen loads-worth of detergent out of it. And when the liquid level gets low, you’re probably going to have to bust that box wide open and pull out the weird pouch inside so that you can get to the last few drops of detergent. Pouring detergent out of a bottle is actually pretty handy, when you think about it.
Who knows how well the Tide Eco-Box will really work. What we do know is that this is the latest example of companies bending to e-commerce needs when designing products. For P&G specifically, this design follows a rather space-age innovation that’s being tested with Dawn dish soap and Old Spice body wash. Instead of putting those liquids in a plastic bottle, the company invented a gusseted pouch with a tear-off top. Once it’s been opened, the pouch has a self-sealing valve that’s also supposed to be spill proof. You’ll notice an Amazon cameo in this commercial for the new design:
So even though it’s not specifically mentioned, Amazon is becoming synonymous with e-commerce and efforts like this to make products more e-commerce friendly. Part of the challenge for companies that see sales shifting from store shelves to Amazon warehouses is the fact that selling certain goods comes with a lot of special Amazon-specific packaging requirements. There’s a YouTube video from Fulfillment by Amazon, for instance, that explains the specific process for shipping liquids. Amazon also maintains a dynamic list of “products regulated as dangerous goods,” and if sellers don’t do the right paperwork or package things correctly, their listings can be taken down. Laundry detergent and dish soap are currently on this list of dangerous goods.
Amazon’s ambitions to control packaging and, as a result, even more of its supply chain doesn’t stop at soap. The company has embarked on a newly aggressive effort to work directly with producers and sellers to create packaging that better adapts to its logistics needs. Earlier this year, Hasbro partnered with Amazon to redesign its toy packaging to eliminate extra space in the boxes and cut down on waste, as part of a decade-old Amazon program called Frustration-Free Packaging. Amazon did a whole video and blog post celebrating the partnership. Remember those windows that let kids see the doll inside the box? Those are going away, but Hasbro Toys are getting some extra promotion on Amazon dot com.
Things have gotten even more aggressive lately. In September, Amazon announced a new incentive system that rewarded companies for complying with the Frustration-Free Packaging guidelines. These sellers who sent properly designed packages through Amazon’s fulfillment centers could get those products delivered directly to consumers with the original branding on the outside. No more box within an Amazon box. Also, Amazon gave qualifying companies credits to help cover shipping costs, a gesture that seems to say, “thanks for playing by the rules which we’re always changing to better suit our own business interests.”
Frighting as it might be to admit, this is just more evidence that Amazon is getting so big that it’s not just changing how the world ships goods. It’s changing how we package them, too. And frankly, the United States Postal Service could be doing the same thing, if it weren’t too busy struggling to ship so many Amazon packages. In other words, package design does change because of rules and regulations that aren’t dictated by Amazon. A company called Garçon Wines, for example, recently created a flat wine bottle so its packages could fit through standard-sized mail slots in the United Kingdom. They’re kind of funny-looking, but they also make it easier to order wine.
So, we’re just a few weeks from 2019, and it looks like our future is full of soap-filled pouches, smaller boxes for dolls, and flat bottles of wine. It’s a little weird, though some of this new stuff will make some peoples’ lives easier. All of these e-commerce friendly innovations are bound to improve Amazon’s bottom line, though. Not that the company needs any help.
Amazon will inevitably be the e-commerce powerhouse for years to come, so we should expect more companies to design more things specifically for the online store. Just last week, we saw Apple and Amazon strike a deal that led to Apple selling its products on the site for the first time as long as Amazon agreed not to let non-authorized third party resellers sell stuff. We’ve seen TVs equipped with Fire TV software and designed to be sold only on Amazon. And we’ve seen companies that couldn’t keep up with the Amazon approach to e-commerce go bankrupt.
This is only the beginning. Just wait until Alexa becomes sentient and starts deciding how you’ll dress, what you’ll eat, and who you love. It’s not the craziest idea any more.
The creators of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge, a 40-foot stainless steel structure titled simply “The Bridge” that looks tantalizingly otherworldly thanks to its unique construction methods, say it is now ready for installation in Amsterdam following its ongoing week on show at the Dutch Design Week from Oct. 20-28.
The team at MX3D, which originally planned to build the Joris Laarman Lab-designed bridge in mid-air over a canal but later opted to construct it in a controlled environment away from pedestrians, told Gizmodo in a statement that it is now ready to commence the structure’s final installation in Amsterdam’s famed De Wallen red-light district. They’ve also shared a number of photos from the finished bridge, which is designed to look like two billowing sheets connected by organic curves of steel, on display at the festival. It looks fantastic:
As the construction method is new and has not previously been used in any such large-scale project, MX3D worked with Amsterdam officials to develop a new safety standard and have also coordinated with partners including the UK’s Alan Turing Institute to equip it with a network of sensors. MX3D told Gizmodo that once in place the structure will be capable of collecting data on “bridge traffic, structural integrity, and the surrounding neighborhood and environment,” with the information being “used as input for a ‘digital twin’ of the bridge” that will be monitored to detect any safety issues. A steel deck on the bottom of the bridge should also provide additional stability.
“Last Thursday we tested out the bridge with 30 people, and it was fine. It behaves like a bridge like it should,” MX3D co-founder Gijs van der Velden told Gizmodo in an interview earlier this year. “With the bridge deck on top, it will be even stronger.”
It’s not the first 3D-printed bridge: Another project in the Dutch village of Gemert using concrete opened in 2017, though the results were nowhere near as visually impressive. MX3D’s original plan to construct the bridge on-site in mid-air may not have materialized, though the robots it used to apply layers of stainless steel to the structure could be eventually be used to construct stunning facades at building sites that would be extremely difficult or expensive to make using conventional methods. There are also potential commercial applications for the technology outside of construction, MX3D said, such as manufacturing in the maritime and aviation sectors.
Though the Dutch Design Week preview is the best look we’ve had at the bridge yet, and it’s pretty much ready, MX3D says that it cannot be installed at its final location on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal at the crossing with the Stoofsteeg until renovations of the canal are completed. If all goes well, “The Bridge” should be able to be placed no earlier than mid-2019.
“After such a challenging project the MX3D team is proud to be able to invite people to use the bridge for the first time,” van der Velden told Gizmodo in a statement. “This will help us to generate the data we need to make our designs more intelligent every time.”
Despite Essential being first, after Apple adopted the notch, nearly every other smartphone maker jumped on the bandwagon and made those stupid little cutouts at the top of the screen the most discussed and reviled feature on handsets in the last 18 months.
The thing is though, notches were never really that cool, and while some companies have added clever shading to minimize their impact, you never really forget they are there, no matter how hard they try to conceal them. And while nerds waged war over notches versus bezels, those cutouts couldn’t be stopped and before you knew it, they had exploded out from one phone into a myriad of shapes and sizes.
But now, just as quickly as notch went mainstream, its demise is already in sight thanks to the first generation of truly bezel-less devices. So as a tribute to one of the most inane design trends of the modern smartphone era, here’s an ode to the evolution of the notch, from big foreheads and chins to bucktoothed indents to the final all-screen dream
iPhone 8: “Old and Busted”
The iPhone 8 and every other big-bezel phone is our starting point. These are the handsets
with unapologetically large chins that feature so much wasted space that you often wonder if their designers simply didn’t. Lost a Ping Pong paddle? No problem, just whip out an Xperia XZ2 Premium. Need to roll out some dough but don’t have a cutting board? The standard Pixel 2 has you covered. This is the type of construction we’re trying to get away from. And don’t get me started by saying things like “But if you make bezels smaller, how do you hold the phone?” You’ve got fingers, not meat hooks, let’s not pretend otherwise.
Google Pixel 2 XL AKA “Minimum Effort”
Since its inception, Google’s Pixel phones have been way more about nifty software than innovative hardware, and the boring designs of the the Pixel 1 and Pixel 2 prove that. And when every other phonemaker was slimming down its bezels, so did Google, except Google did it with the finesse of a Kanye West appearance. So while it’s nice that the Pixel 2 XL has front facing speakers, just looking at the placement of the speaker and the front-facing cam shows how inefficient the Pixel 2's bezels really are. This is a design screams that minimum effort.
Galaxy S9: “The Handsome Holdout”
As the only mainstream phone maker that hasn’t adopted the notch, Samsung’s recent handsets show it’s possible to ignore trends and still look good. The top bezel on the Galaxy S9 is especially impressive as Samsung crams a selfie cam, ambient light sensor, dual iris sensors, proximity sensor, LED indicator, and an earpiece-speaker combo into less than 7mm of space. And while the S9’s blank bezel below the display isn’t quite as feature rich, it creates a nicely balanced aesthetic without the ridiculous excess of previous fat bezel phones. However, as sleek as Samsung’s design is, bezels have got to go.
Xiaomi Mi Mix 2: “The One-Sided Wonder”
OK, technically the Xiaomi wasn’t the first company to toy with a phone featuring no bezels on three sides of the device, that honor goes to the original Sharp Aquos Crystal from way back in 2014(!). But for the Mi Mix and Mi Mix 2, Xiaomi took that concept and improved on it significantly increasing the phones’ screen-to-body ratio and using clever tricks like piezoelectric speakers to make the earpiece disappear. Now there’s still a bit of awkwardness since you need to flip the phone upside down to take a selfie, but those are just the sort of (temporary) sacrifices that get made when chasing an all screen experience.
iPhone X/XS: “The Thousand Dollar Special”
Here we are, the phone that transformed the notch from a design statement to a way of life. That’s because inside that cutout, on top of your normal sensors and cameras, the iPhone X and XS sport infrared 3D dot projectors so you can unlock the phone with your face. It’s cool, it’s neat, and one of the few “innovations” that Apple actually managed to do first. And for that luxury, Apple raised the price of flagship phones to $1,000. But what’s even funnier about all this, is that Apple’s switch to Face ID may be the reason why future iPhones will still feature notches long after every other phone maker has jumped ship.
Google Pixel 3 XL: “The O__O Bathtub”
As we sit here at the end of 2018, notches have become pretty commonplace. And just when you think things had gotten to point where they couldn’t annoy you any more, Google went a put this massive bathtub-sized cut out on the top of the Pixel 3 XL. Look, I know XL stands for extra large, but perhaps Google didn’t need to take things so literally. That cutout takes up nearly two lines of notification icons, and considering the Pixel 3 XL also has a pretty sizable chin below its screen, it’s really a wonder why its notch needed to be that big.
Huawei P20: “The Copycat Mini Notch”
This category is for all the phones at came in the iPhone X’s wake. Many of the notches on devices like the Huawei P20 Pro, Asus Zenfone 5, LG G7, and others are smaller and more compact than Apple’s cutout, except not quite as functional and even less memorable. This marks the point when the notch transitioned from a novel idea to simply a means to an end—a way to offer a little more display but without any other radical changes.
Essential Phone: “The OG”
Here it is, the original, the forefather, the PH-1, or more simply, the Essential Phone. This is the device that got the whole notch movement started, and in a somewhat perverse timeline of events, it was one of the least obtrusive cutouts among notched devices until the arrival of the phones below. It was simple and it only had one job to do: provide a place for the front-facing camera to live. And when you consider the rest of Essential’s lovingly minimalist design, the PH-1’s notch was something that made the phone more appealing, not less, which was a lesson that many of Essential’s followers never really captured.
Vivo V11/Oppo R17: “The Tender Teardrop”
More than a year after the PH-1, this is what the Essential notch has become: a slightly curvier but similarly-sized cut. It’s as iterative as iterative gets and it while the teardrop-shaped cutout on the Vivo V11 and Oppo R17 might help you tell your phone apart from the multitude of other notched devices, with phones like the Huawei Mate 20 coming soon, it’s probably already too late. The teardrop is merely a stepping stone, a bit of pithy self-expression, but not the end goal. That full-screen promised land is within sight, but that last little cutout isn’t gone quite yet.
Oppo Find X/Vivo Nex S: “The All-Screen Dream”
Finally, we’ve arrived. The Oppo Find X and the Vivo Nex have made the all-screen dream a reality. One phone has an entire section that rises up to reveal a selfie shooter, while the other features a much smaller popup housing that looks more like a flash on an old-school camera than a selfie cam. But the results are the same. There’s no cutouts or other distractions to take away from the display, which means you can fully utilize the phone’s screen real estate for watching movies, playing games, or doing anything else you want. And yet, as finished consumer-ready devices, both of these phones are flawed and aren’t really available outside of Asia. But as examples for the other extreme of the notched phone spectrum, it’s mission accomplished.
From here on out, everything will just be slight variations on this until something more revolutionary comes around, which may not be too long if Samsung lives up to its promises of debuting a bendy-screen handset before the end of the year. But still, here’s the evolutionary path of the notch from start to finish. What a wild ride it’s been.
A framed canvas version of Girl with Balloon by Banksy, the pseudonymous street artist whose true identity remains unknown despite the best efforts of researchers and journalists alike, just sold at London auction house Sotheby’s for at least $1.1 million. At pretty much the exact moment the work was sold, a hidden device in the work’s frame activated, apparently sucking a little over a third of the print through a shredder mounted in the bottom.
Video of the incident posted to Banksy’s Instagram account alongside the quote “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge” show that the frame of the painting does not appear to have any wires attached. TechCrunch noted that the art in question was listed as being given to the owner by Banksy in 2006, meaning that the internal components as well as a charged battery inside either lasted 12 years—seemingly unlikely—or the device was primed prior to the sale by someone working on behalf of the artist. In either case, it seems likely an individual in attendance hit a remote trigger as soon as the auction closed.
According to Bloomberg, this all certainly resulted in a typically Banksian reaction:
Cue footage of amazement and outrage.
Sotheby’s said it’s discussing what do next with the anonymous buyer, who was bidding by phone. The U.K.’s Press Association suggested that Banksy might even have been involved in the bidding process, while some observers posited the idea that whole event wasn’t quite as unexpected as Sotheby’s made out.
At a briefing immediately after the sale, the auction house tried to explain the incident.
“We’ve just been Banksy’ed,” said Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art.
It is obviously entirely possible that the shredded piece is now worth more, given that it was the linchpin of a high-profile art prank. It’s also unclear whether the print was in fact shredded or whether a secondary print was rolled up inside, and the whole thing is a parlor trick.
This could be could be construed as commentary, a twist on Banksy’s well-publicized distaste for the rich people buying and selling his art at grotesque prices like he’s Jeff Koons or something. Or it could interpreted as rubbish, selling fundamentally lazy and internally inconsistent “gotchas” about cultural capitalism back to the ultra-wealthy architects of it as monuments to themselves. As the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker put it in 2006:
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I’ll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your worldview changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick v-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one Banksy! You’ve shown us the truth, yeah?
“Banksy is just basically hilarious to me,” Cullen Crawford, a comedy writer who ran the (seemingly now-defunct) Twitter account @LazyBanksy, told the Daily Dot in 2012. “He’s like if an overwrought editorial cartoon went to college at Urban Outfitters.”
As opposed to prior supposedly biting critiques Banksy has made of the art world like a print titled I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit, this one is at least a good punchline regardless of what one thinks of the underlying message.
As one Twitter user noted, another work that had a bit more to say about the concept of destruction was artist Chris Burden’s 1988 exhibition of Samson, which consisted of a 100-ton jack pressed against supporting walls at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and tied to a turnstile such that (in theory, if not in practice) if enough visitors attended the building would collapse. Fire officials later had the piece removed as a safety hazard.
Correction: A prior version of this article misspelled the pseudonym of the artist known as Banksy, whose true identity is currently unknown but is probably not just one letter off from “Banksy.” We regret the error.
When we say pop culture is iconic, we don’t usually mean it this literally.
Monarobot, an artist from Mexico, does, though: in a series of fascinating fan art, they turn characters from pop culture—dragons, monsters, mechs—into glyph icons, fashioned deliberately after Mayan art. With vivid colors and sharp stylization, these pieces capture something of the religious, the mythological, in pop culture. We’ve looked at their art, a few years back, when they were tackling Pokemon, and they’re still at it, still making stunning iconic pieces.
Check some of them out below. Thanks to Monarobot for the permission, and check out their Patreon if you’re interested in supporting their work.
Making a bustling city more bike-friendly can be a good way to cut down on traffic and congestion. But while introducing dedicated bicycle lanes to existing roads can be an expensive upgrade, adding more bike racks shouldn’t be, which is why cyclists in Quebec City, Quebec, are miffed that the city is adding just seven of them at a cost of $165,000 CDN. That comes out to about $18,000 USD each.
Two years ago, the city commissioned designers to create a unique bike rack that was not only functional, but also an aesthetically-pleasing addition to Quebec City’s historic neighborhoods. As the CBC reports, of the 18 submissions received, two were selected as finalists: Québec à vélo, a wood and metal design by Para-Sol, and ABCyclette by Hatem+D Architecture, which uses the rack’s metal tubing to spell out the names of local landmarks.
Each firm received $30,000 CDN for the full rights to their respective designs, and to produce a single prototype, but the money didn’t stop there. Four semi-finalists were awarded $10,000 CDN each for their contributions, five jury members were paid $2,000 CDN for their assistance, and $35,000 CDN has been allocated to produce five racks based on whichever rack is selected as the winner of the contest. And because this is Canada, an additional $20,000 CDN was claimed by taxes.
Industrial design doesn’t come cheap, and creating something that balances form and function often requires input from experienced and talented designers. But the CBC crunched the numbers and calculated that the new racks will essentially each cost the city $2,950 CDN per bike spot—which is undoubtedly far more expensive than most of the bikes that will get locked up on them. Even if you think most bike racks are eyesores, they’re still better than staring at a street jammed with angry, honking motorists. And for $165,000 CDN, Quebec City could have done much more to accommodate cyclists.
The Spotify logo is tilted. It took me entirely too long to know this for sure.
For at least three years, I’ve been tapping and clicking the app icon and watching the logo appear as the service loads. Looking at the lime-green circle with its black, curved lines, it just seemed a little off-kilter. But to my eyes, it also isn’t tilted enough to seem intentional. Surely this wasn’t a mistake made by Spotify’s designers—I figured—or maybe it was just an optical illusion. Or I was simply going nuts?
Regardless, it’s continued to drive me nuts over the last several months. I recently searched online for others who identified with this personal struggle and thankfully, I am far from alone. The Spotify logo has made numerous appearances on Reddit’s r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit. And at least hundreds of people have vented their frustration on Twitter:
Spotify users have also reached out to the company directly, pleading for it to change the logo. Consider this comment from one person who posted on the company’s community page under the title “fix ur **bleep**ing logo”:
look i don’t know why y’all made the logo crooked but it’s pissing me off and i can’t stop thinking about it. maybe that was the goal i don’t know. all i know is that i’m mad and the logo needs to be fixed immediately.
However, when I raised the issue with the Gizmodo staff, I realized my colleagues did not share my grievance.
“huh never bothered me before,” one editor wrote on Slack, before mustering some sympathy: “but now i kinda see why it’d irk u.”
Some Gizmodo reporters humored me and chimed in with their theories.
“leads your eye towards the type,” wrote one Gizmodo reporter, who is probably more level-headed than me. “if it was perfectly straight it would look flat imo.”
And that does makes sense. But the logo only bothers me when it is presented without the company name, floating on its own.
“i would guess they are doing it to avoid looking like the icon people use for wifi,” wrote another Gizmodo reporter, “because aside from being green, most people prolly couldn’t pick it out.”
Another colleague from io9 agreed that a straight-up icon would look like a wifi symbol. But adding more tilt would also be problematic. “If it were rotated more clockwise, it’d look too much like an RSS logo,” they wrote.
Spotify did not respond to a request for comment on this matter. Fortunately, Gizmodo gained some insight into the design in 2013, when then-staffer Peter Ha interviewed Spotify designers Christian Wilsson and Andreas Holmström about the brand redesign.
Gizmodo: What’s the deal with those waves or squiggles or whatever they are? In the redesign they’ve been moved off to the left.
CW: We noticed that people have been complaining on the Interwebs about them not being perfect. We had tried out the golden ratio on them but that made it look even more weird. This version is a little more organic and it’s not super perfect, which I think gives it more personality.
So it seems people have been complaining about the logo since the beginning.
As the article shows, in the original design, the “waves” were emanating out of the “o” in “Spotify.” But when the waves were moved away from the name and into their own icon, the asymmetry became a little more prominent.
In the interview, Ha was also able to shed some light on what those “waves” actually represent.
Gizmodo: Going back to the waves for a second. What are they?
CW: *laughing* I was the first guy to do the logo back in 2006 and we came up with the waves then. It’s basically illustrating streaming. Or at least that’s what the thought was back then and now. It’s supposed to be streaming.
AH: I’ve read some discussions on Twitter that it’s audio waves. But we think of it as streaming. It’s good that it could be both.
To me, the message is clear: Spotify’s vision of streaming is just a little crooked. Just crooked enough to annoy me, but not enough to stop me from using the service.
After a recent trip to her local dispensary, my mom recalled how, when she was young, black-market cannabis was really only available by the “lid”—usually, a sandwich bag partly filled with ground-up plant, the official size of which tended to vary. Today, she can choose rich, cleverly named buds by the gram or quarter ounce from hundreds of California locations;they come tucked into dark plastic pop-top vials, or windowed envelopes lined with golden, scent-blocking mylar, or—increasingly, as mainstream tastes and funds flow in—are served up as a prerolled botanic experience for a few dollars more.
Across the state, cannabis businesses are struggling to make sense of new options for packaging their products, as well a shifting set of rules for making them legally compliant. As a result, manufacturers and retailers face rising costs that can easily snuff out small operators, and a trend of increasingly stylized marketing that often seeks to leave the cannabis industry’s history of conflict and culture behind.
According to those who have watched and helped grow the industry since its grey- and black-market days, regulators’ current trajectory may make buying and selling cannabis even harder for many. At the same time, innovations inspired by legal weed could soon change pharmacy as we know it.
New laws, new look: A millennia-old drug gets a makeover
After close to a century of U.S. cannabis prohibition, and decades of continuing, racially biased arrests and incarceration,legalcannabis businesses are working overtime to combat stigma around the drug, which remains federally illegal and excluded from most mainstream medicine.
Even as many cannabis growers, distributors, and consumers from the previous black-market industry continue serving jail and prison sentences around the country, new investors in legal markets are trying to tip the scales of cannabis perception directly from ‘criminal’ to ‘healthful,’ or even ‘couture.’
At the same time, as cannabis attorney Hilary Bricken, who co-writes the website Canna Law Blog, said in a phone interview, businesses are under increasing pressure to build brand recognition and loyalty in a veritable sea of green products. As the industry moves toward standardization, she said, businesses are trying out ways to promote their products within a competitive—and sometimes overwhelming—new legal marketplace.
“Packaging is one area that is becoming increasingly sophisticated and stylized, from branded [infused beverage] bottles and tins to really put-together boxes,” Bricken said. “It’s a narrow way for brands to distinguish themselves—and one way they can try to beat the black market and end prohibition.”
As the legal industry struggles to keep ahead of the black market, companies in California and other states are trying a somewhat psychological approach, Bricken said. “The idea is, why would you buy a gram on the corner when you could buy something that looks like it’s from Whole Foods?”
To that end, seemingly, many large operators have started taking similar aesthetic cues in how they package their buds and pre-rolls. In a direct rejection of the “lids” and Playboy bunny- or smiley face-stamped dime bags that ruled weed until just a few years ago, packaging now tends to feature handwriting-style text and abstract, herbal designs in an assortment of soothing colors.
This spring, Packaging Digest reported that the top five trends in cannabis packaging are “Leafy imagery; Green in color and in ethos; A focus on health; Minimalism; Playing with stereotypes.” AdWeek also reflected recently that the best cannabis brands are “creating marketing history while simultaneously changing public opinion with their perfectly packaged creations … [and] raising the bar at the intersection of wellness, compliance and luxury branding.”
Canndescent, for example, wraps its cannabis flower and pre-rolled joints “in an entirely new way, throwing traditional slang-sounding strain names to the wind and instead using their packaging to tell a story about how the product will make the user feel or painting a picture of the type of occasion that strain might best accompany.”
The firm also reportedly put together “collectible single-strain gift sets complete with branded matches and rolling papers [into] cross body bags inspired by designers such as Coach and Hermes,” and distributed them last year to “exclusive” party guests during California’s Coachella music festival.
Other design choices in the current market are somewhat simpler, if also plying ‘chill’ themes. According to packaging manufacturer StandupPouches.com, for example, rapper, entrepreneur, and renowned weed supporter Snoop Dogg chose to bedeck his signature Leafs By Snoop line with “California-inspired imagery, pastels, and gold colors that are inspired by T-shirts he would wear poolside or at the beach.”
As money has poured into the legal industry, totally new forms of cannabis packaging have also been springing up. From child-resistant jars to reusable cans, a wave of updated containers has swept legal weed recently, tapping areas of design that pharmaceutical and over-the-counter (OTC) drugmakers have mostly ignored.
There are increasingly slick, customizable bottles and boxes, prerolled-joint vials, quaint jars, and all number of cartridges for vape-pen users. Because child resistance has been a key area of most states’ packaging regulations, there are also patent-ed (or -pending) tins and tubes, and sturdy ‘exit bags’ with proprietary zip/pull/stand-up features.
Some manufacturers have also been exploring greener alternatives to popular mylar and plastic containers. HISIERRA co-founder Mike Greenfield, who chose to enter cannabis packaging after 30 years in more mainstream bag-making (his claim to fame: the Subway sandwich carrier bag), said he decided to look beyond plastic cannabis ‘barrier bags’ after clients complained that there were no available products with both high performance and a low eco-footprint.
A couple years later, the company is now producing exit bags almost entirely composed of a plastic that’s derived from sugarcane, a “renewable, sustainable material,” Greenfield said. Unlike with most normal plastic manufacturing, with is usually a “filthy” process, he explained, the company’s Texas manufacturing plant has nixed the smokestack, turns out cleaner air and water than goes in, and relies entirely on nearby wind power.
California’s green rush grows up
Last year, Californians voted to legalize adult recreational cannabis use and sales starting January 1, 2018, requiring a range of brand-new regulations. After more than 20 years’ experience under medicinal cannabis laws, operators have had to re-calibrate everything from labels to processing to accommodate the new rules—three sets of them since California went rec.
State lawmakers officially began tackling comprehensive recreational cannabis legislation back in 2017. But between the industry’s many different needs, cash-fueled interests, and the usual political sticky gears, they only delivered their long-term proposal in July. In the meantime, the entire legal cannabis supply chain has had to adopt a set of temporary rules known as “Emergency Regulations,” which saw significant changes halfway through the year.
Some rules appear in all three versions, but others have forced operators to quickly change directions, or even sent them in circles.
For example, for the first six months of 2018, California retailers needed to ensure that all departing customers had their cannabis products contained in child-resistant ‘exit bags.’ These are reusable plastic and/or mylar bags, available in stores and online for around $1 a pop, which allow its contents to be protected, more or less, from the wandering eyes and hands of kids.
Because there’s a limited number of bag-makers out there, and only so many ways (mostly patented) that bags can be both child-proof and resealable, they have also raised costs for businesses and consumers, and added to some groups’ concerns about the huge amount of plastic being used in the industry.
Starting July 1, however, exit bags were no longer to be included in California’s temporary regulations for packaging weed. Instead, the state said it would require cannabis products to be packaged and labelled only by licensed manufacturers and distributors, taking the whole process—including the task of weighing out fresh flower—out of the hands of retail-only businesses.
And then, about two weeks later, California released a set of proposed permanent rules requiring products to be both made individually child-proof by manufacturers or distributors and contained in child-proof bags when customers are exiting stores. Meanwhile, businesses have also had to adjust to new requirements for lab testing, portion size, and other key factors in the cannabis production process—making compliant packaging just one of many issues operators have to keep track of.
“I think operators are very annoyed by it,” said cannabis attorney Hilary Bricken. “After having no oversight in this area for 20 years, they now have to comply with very specific packaging requirements, and if you get it wrong, there are severe penalties for violating those rules.”
Numerous cannabis industry members said they had planned to continue stocking and using exit bags despite the (ultimately brief) rule change, since they expected things to evolve. Overall, they said, being forced to stay ahead of potential future regulations is simply too costly for most, and—when businesses can afford it—may jam up the already understaffed, shortage-prone supply chain.
Jamie Warm, CEO of Henry’s Original, said new packaging rules are “changing the face of the whole industry,” where retailers have traditionally made their own packaging, prerolls, and other products. “Essentially we’re seeing an enormous amount of regulations that are creating more barriers to entry into the market, and forcing brands to consolidate. There are positive and negative sides to that.”
“Without any enforcement, companies striving to be compliant are at risk of going out of business because they’re competing against companies not playing by the same set of rules,” Warm said.
“But compliance is difficult, and adds a lot of cost, material, and labor,” he continued. “It’s hard to get into the business right now unless you’re extraordinarily well-capitalized; unfortunately, we’re seeing smaller retailers and producers fall by the wayside.”
Weed invites Big Pharma to the 21st century
According to some experts, the tradition of medicinal containers in general is long overdue for an update, and cannabis innovators could offer the solution—or at least help smoke it out.
Dr. Laura Bix, a professor at Michigan State University’s School of Packaging and an adjunct associate at Clemson University, explained by phone that years of research around medical packaging and containers have taught her that the pharmaceutical industry is slow to change its formats. It’s also drowning in those push-and-turn “amber vials” that have ruled pharmacies since she was a kid in the 1970s, and which many of the most common weed containers are based on.
Bix, who previously investigated the “senior-friendly” package tests required for pill bottles, said that she and her team have been examining the “paradox and paradigm” of child-resistant packaging (CRP) to find ways of improving current methods. “You’ve got these increasingly adept toddlers who are reading earlier, and are wired to explore the world and try different things. At the older end of the spectrum, we’re increasingly moving people into home care, and away from acute or ambulatory care,” she commented.
“As a result, we increasingly have very sophisticated drugs and devices in home environments, where children may be present; it’s a very difficult paradox that designers have to deal with and accommodate, and we’ve tried to look at how we can separate the increasingly frail older group, who’s engaged in polypharmacy, from the younger end of the spectrum according to ability.”
Like the push-and-turn pill bottles we’re all familiar with, Bix noted, most CRP relies on “tripping kids up” at a later stage in the mental process—typically, when they have already absorbed a bottle’s instructions and comprehended its meaning, and are at last trying to push and turn simultaneously. These kinds of tasks are tricky when using toddler-level strength, motor skills, and coordination, but not impossible, and can pose issues for senior patients, Bix said.
So after ruling out other potentially useful variables between the two age groups, Bix and her colleagues are now testing a totally new and pretty darn funny strategy for protecting curious kids: distract them. Bix commented, “We know young children are perceptual processors, not cognitive ones, so we thought, what if we try a distraction?” And they did just that.
With support from researcher Rita Chen and others, Bix’s team conducted a study in 2014 called “The Red Herring Project” to see whether a lenticular image placed on the bottom of a package would help keep toddlers busy, and out of its contents. They found that kids took three times as long to get into packaging when the non-functioning end had a tantalizing lenticular, thereby adding another layer of protection.
Currently Bix and her team are working on revising their study for publication, and conducting a follow-up study to explore whether such images become “an attractive nuisance,” drawing kids to bottles or boxes they’d otherwise ignore.
Overall, she said, “The big takeaway from both studies is there’s a lot of room for new thinking in CRP, particularly in the US, where we’re married to the amber vial and cap—the rest of the world doesn’t take that approach, and as we’ve invested so much infrastructure in that shape, it’s in many ways become a sacred cow.”
Bix added that she’s been excited to see new packaging ideas coming out of the cannabis industry, too, and hopes such innovation will also catch on in pharmacy. “It’s interesting that cannabis comes in so many formulations and delivery mechanisms, and it strikes me as maybe a more creative industry. We may see some innovations on that side [of medicinal packaging] that end up on the other side as well.”
As packaging pushes weed forward, roots may be left behind
According to those on the front lines, California regulators haven’t actually started enforcing the state’s temporary regulations too much yet (understandably, given their seemingly low numbers), but businesses say they’re bracing for it more now that July 1 has come and gone.
Amber Senter, an Oakland-based manufacturer and co-founder of Supernova Women, an organization that offers networking for women of color interested in entering the cannabis industry, commented by phone that she’s mostly heard of regulators issuing warnings so far, regarding products with more-than-allowable THC and the like.
However, she expects to see more action soon. Now that products are required to be laboratory tested and clearly labelled to that effect (among other info), Senter believes regulators are likely to target dispensaries, where they can quickly spot products that don’t measure up, and start issuing fines. And packaging is only one thing that’s on would-be compliant operators’ minds.
“The biggest problem right now from the manufacturing side right now is testing,” Senter said. Packaging and labeling “sucks,” and is expensive in its own right, but laboratory compliance tests—which cost roughly $1,000 per cannabis substance, rather than per product, and require large samples—are “putting a nail in people’s coffins,” Senter continued. Such costs are also the reason that her company’s signature pre-roll, which comes dipped in concentrate and dusted with keef, is no longer on offer.
And while lab testing itself remains California’s most expensive and bottlenecked requirement, Senter said, the issue of best practices for packaging is still vital, and far from settled.
For one thing, the amount of plastic materials required to keep businesses compliant has skyrocketed, forcing both eco-friendly and small businesses to reconsider their models.
Under the newest set of rules, businesses must sell only laboratory-tested products that are pre-measured, don’t exceed 1000mg total THC content (or 100mg, split into 10mg servings, if the product is edible), and were created no later than January 1, 2018.
Senter, who manufactures cannabis-infused popcorn, said that in order to be compliant she would now have to pre-package each 10mg serving of her product within the 100mg bags she sells. Instead, she’s pivoted to selling individual 10mg bags for now, rather than create the extra waste.
She also bought a “really expensive” full-color label maker, so she won’t have to order new labels every time the rules change about what info must be displayed.
“Hopefully, in time, regulations will catch up to the demand of what people actually want, and regulators will realize there is no huge public safety risk, because we’ve been doing this for a while,” Senter noted.
For another thing, the exact definition of CRP isn’t totally set in stone, either by California cannabis regulators or the market at large.
The California Department of Public Health does require cannabis packaging to meet standards outlined in the federal Poison Prevention Packaging Act, which already applies to pill bottles and other dangerous-substance containers. However, the actual testing occurs at contracted labs, which may differ slightly in their appraisals of certain product types.
Scott Martin, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for cannabis packaging distributor N2 Packaging Systems, commented by phone that his team spent the past 10 months observing testing for their two new, patent-pending products—one a reusable child-resistant beverage lid, and the other a nitrogen-sealed reusable and recyclable can inspired by a way of preserving ammunition, with tomato-can-quality lining to preserve terpenes—through the course of some eye-opening methodology.
In order to test a container’s capacity for both child resistance and senior friendliness, as required by law, it must be given to a large number of young children and older adults (generally 50 of the former and 100 of the latter, each with equal gender dispersal) who are instructed to open them. In kids’ case, Martin said, they have five minutes to do anything they want to get it open, including using their teeth. If they fail, they are then given instructions on how to open it, and five more minutes to attempt this.
After seeing this testing first-hand, Martin said, “I am very surprised that some of the containers out there with pop lids are considered child-resistant, and have a hard time understanding how the kids who destroyed our lids wouldn’t be able to get through that.” He continued, “If we’re serious about restricting children from getting into certain things, glass should be eliminated from the venue, too—even most shatter-resistant glass will smash if you drop it.”
Overall, Martin said, “The packaging in our industry is extremely poor. I think plastic cans are a terrible idea, and metal cans are the most recycled item on the planet, which is why we continue to look outside medicine for other options like that—and in this industry, looking at more environmentally friendly packaging is a priority.”
George Sang, a Chicago-based trial attorney and CEO of Compliant Packaging, believes that significantly more stringent rules for cannabis processing and CRP are likely to be imposed down the road, anyway, assuming the U.S. gets with the program.
“It’ll be a different ball game in the future, especially with automation coming around the corner, because the labor cost of packaging these products for cultivators is expensive,” Sang said. In some ways, weed manufacturing and processing regulations may even start to mirror those of food production, and other closely supervised fields.
“When and if it becomes federally permissible to produce cannabis, workers will probably have to be washed down before they go into a grove, and checked for metals in the production line,” he said. As far as packaging goes, Sang commented that federal legalization will certainly bring in new standards that are “much more pharmaceutical,” too.
For their part, cannabis operators are aware that numerous changes to how products are made and sold are almost inevitable in years to come, in individual states and across the country.
Cesar Muro, Project Coordinator for the packaging distributor MarijuanaPackaging.com, and Brittny Peloquin, Marketing Manager for the company, commented by phone that they’ve heard lots of concerns from clients about how sudden rule changes could uproot their business plans, including their very careful packaging investments.
“The manufacturing process for bags or products can take 90 days,” Muro said. “Everyone wants to brand their products, and let people know theirs is the best. That’s hard to do when you’re using blank bags because you don’t know what regulations will be in 90 days, or a month.”
Peloquin also commented, “Dispensary owners are some of the most well-informed people I’ve ever worked with. They’re so good at staying on top of these things while they basically have a target on their backs, they’re pioneers, and they’re there to make a living.”
For now, they’ll probably have to keep planning ahead in several directions, and stocking up on plastic bottles and vials indefinitely, too. And maybe—if personal preference and state regulations permit—finding time away from the ‘green rush’ to recoup with some Cali gold.
