It sometimes seems as though we’re swimming in an endless sea of packaging.
It’s everywhere - don’t believe me?
Take a look in your pantry, bathroom cabinet or that cupboard under the sink in the kitchen - now do you believe me?
A mind-boggling array of bottles, tubes, packets and boxes.
Now, while it can be over-done, I generally feel packaging to be quite practical and useful. It keeps things in good condition, stops small things getting lost and loose things getting scattered - it makes things manageable.
It also provides a place for manufacturers to put product information and, most importantly, allows them to ‘brand’ their products.
Once a design has been arrived at, producers seem very unwilling to change it. They may ‘tweak’ it a bit or make incremental changes; but a sudden, radical, re-design seems quite rare. Quite why this should be the case is a mystery to me. Perhaps they don’t want to risk ‘jinxing’ something that seems to be working or breaking the spell they’ve spent so much time, and money, casting over consumers.
The trouble is, this virtual stasis can be a bit of a ‘double edged sword’. Yes it keeps a product ‘familiar’ and ‘safe’; but it also leads to it eventually becoming invisible - after a while it is so familiar that it ceases to register.

Imagine then, my surprise when this:

Turned into this:

Pretty shocking eh? (Or is it just me?)
I was genuinely amazed at the change. So amazed that I spent quite some time just looking at it. And do you know what - the more I looked, the more I liked what I saw. It’s less busy, sleeker, more… modern. All of the product ‘information’ is there, but without the needless repetition. The brand name and ‘logo’ are still there - bigger than ever - along with the corporate colour scheme. It all just looks nicer - more elegant and stylish (for some reason, I particularly like the fine diagonal stripes). I would guess that this new version is also cheaper to produce. The old version’s central stripe was ‘foiled’, and the packet had embossed / imprinted elements - all of which is missing from the new one, along with their associated costs.

While I feel that this brave new design is inevitably doomed to slide into invisibility, I should like to take this opportunity to say to the unfortunately anonymous designer(s) at jkr: I hope you were suitably well rewarded for this, because you’ve done a great job.