Designed by Base | Country: United States
“Base ‘lights up’ pot-ential through creative reuse.
Base, an award-winning international design firm, announces that its concept packaging design for marijuana cigarettes will be featured in the upcoming issue of PRINT Magazine, on newsstands in mid July.
The magazine’s design challenge was simple: “What would a pack of marijuana cigarettes look like after legalization?” In response, Base has come up with a clean and simple design strategy that recycles mass-produced everyday items popularly used by smokers to transport their secret stashes. The design proposal suggests that anything – from a film canister to an Altoids’ tin – once painted white and marked with the iconic five-blade leaf sticker could be transformed into packaging. The bold, black-and-white design frees the containers from their previous commercial branding.
By re-contextualizing existing containers, Base subverts the environmentally unfriendly cycle of disposable packaging, offering instead a “greener” message more appropriate to the world of marijuana. By offering many types of packaging, Base takes into consideration the many ways people roll marijuana cigarettes and the equally wide variety of people who smoke them. “There’s a whole ritual and tactile experience that goes with smoking, and we didn’t want to detract from that,” said Tom Greenwood of Base. Driving home the point that the design’s intent is simply to be honest to the pre-existing individuality of the product, Greenwood added, “Nobody owns marijuana, man.”
This design concept comes at a time when the public’s opinion towards the legalization of marijuana is changing: 2009 polls reflect that 40 percent of Americans approve of the end of Rockefeller drug laws. It is projected that within the next 15 years these laws will be revised, an impending design deadline that inspired James Gaddy, PRINT Magazine’s senior editor, to invite Base and three other design firms to participate: Lust (Amsterdam), Strømme Throndsen (Oslo), and The Heads of State (Philadelphia). This piece was written by James Gaddy and art directed by Jessica Walsh and Alice Cho.
The full profile appears in the July/August 2009 issue of PRINT Magazine and online at printmag.com.”
