Wppt Contraceptives
If a contraceptive is named Wptt, one wonders who would be buying it. But it sells in China. For the first time I see a communication that radically shifts its focus from the cliched messages such as pleasure, safety and fear.
I always come back to wit in graphic design and how important it is to attain a witty communicative messages. The packaging of Wptt condoms have portraits of national leaders who have an image of trouble makers. And it carries a message, "Such tragedy could have been easily avoided." The Wptt packaging is both loved and hated. Loved because of its novelty and hated because one of the portraits used is of Mao. The other portraits are of Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussain and Geroge W Bush.
Although the intention was to communicate that having sex without a condom can have painful consequences, the trouble maker approach works. After the new packaging was introduced, more than one lakh people have bought the condoms and the sales increased by more than 20%. The packaging also won a Yellow Pencil in the 2009 D&AD awards.
What I acknowledge here is the wholeheartedness of taking an idea forward even it it is not what one would expect it to look like. Graphically, it is engaging and many buyers may be saving it because they like the packaging a lot.
Do see the credits here on D&AD site. You should also see this, a coin design project, which one a Black Pencil. Brilliant.
By Sanjay Basavaraju
© thisisindexed.com
This is where maths meets doodles, it’s where Venn diagrams coincide with humour, and where graphs map the fun stuff. It is Indexed. A blog run by Jessica Hagy, Indexed is an ongoing series of 3x5 inch humourous doodles she does, usually in the form of graphs or Venn diagrams. These cover the funny little things that we see every day, but don’t really notice, or stop to think about.
There are some really funny ones, for example, on the X-axis you have ‘size of your head’ and on the Y-axis you have ‘how seriously you take yourself’. There are observations on journalism, pets, losing your suitcase, food, Ohio, forgiveness, silence, landfills, ownership, deadlines and more. If that seems like a lot, it isn’t really, because it’s given in small doses. Each one is simple, easy to understand, and will make you giggle. Indexed is a visual journal that maps everyday life.
The blog has been published as book - the Indexed Postcard Book, and Indexed was also nominated for the Webby Awards in the Culture/Personal category. It was a Yahoo Pick in 2007, has been featured by BBC, and Time magazine. Jessica is also posting on the New York Times Freakonomics blog.
Indexed is a sweet balance between the logical and the emotional, the trivial and the profound, the mundane reality and a funny point-of-view. Who else could see the connection between the Persian Gulf and mayonnaise?
By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju
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