intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

In the course of writing my article on The Impossible Project and Polaroid for Wired, I had the pleasure of speaking to Polaroid packaging design legend Paul Giambarba. I only managed to included a couple of quotes from Paul in the article so am publishing the full transcript here so you can enjoy his thoughts on working with Polaroid inventor Edwin Land and the modern design culture:

What was like to work with Edwin Land? Was he a tricky customer? And what did he think of the designs you produced for him? The boxes and logos are real icons now.

I can’t make any claim to working with Land. In the six months I spent on assignment on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, I saw more of the Aga Khan IV, spiritual leader of 15 million Ismaili Muslims than I ever saw of Polaroid’s temporal leader. I even had a private lunch with him and his wife. This took place in early 1972. At that point, Polaroid had nothing for me to do while they worked on readying the revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 for introduction. But that’s a whole other movie, as they say.

Land was a tricky customer in that he pitted managers against each other. He left me alone because I was beneath his radar I guess.

Stan Calderwood introduced me to Land and I recall being invited to show up when Scientific American magazine came to interview him. I met with him and Scientific American’s art director while they discussed esoteric things such as the colour spectrum on the moon, speculation that was way over my head.

I thought at the time it was just so much “firing for effect,” as I used to hear during my three hitches in the field artillery as a reluctant noncom from 1948-1957.

My wife, who worked as a secretary for engineers at Sylvania, agrees with me that engineers are a special breed of man often oblivious to all else that surrounds them. I can’t recall Land ever praising or rejecting my work. Calderwood’s successors kept me away from him except to advise me that he demanded white packaging for the SX-70 and its family of products. This was fine with me because it reduced the parameters with which I had to work.

I guess he was happy with what I did and what we ended up with. I was sent to Sardinia to produce 350 print jobs because I was told that Italian printers were untrustworthy, which was and is bullshit. They have some great printers and technicians.

I used Polaroid products, even did an entire how-to book that Doubleday picked up but I had to shoot the photos because Polaroid and the agency couldn’t come up with photos as promised. Other photographers used Polaroid backs on Linhofs and Sinars but I took every shot with an off-the-shelf Model 100 or 180.

At one point, I took such a good photo of my 5-year-old son that I had taken with one of their cheap cameras that I took it, matted it and put it with a similar shot taken with a Hasselblad 500C and 150mm Sonar Lens. The resident experts could not tell them apart.

I didn’t like the Polaroid SX-70 when I first saw its output. I guess it’s because I was used to Kodachrome, Ektachrome and output from Rolleis, Nikons, and Hasseleblad cameras.

The colour Polaroid produced was too green and the flesh tones seemed to be off in my opinion. But they improved the colour balance. However, when my young wife died in 1978, I didn’t take photos for several years and by 1983 I had pretty much lost the Polaroid account I once had.

I didn’t have any response to Polaroid coming to an end. I had been taking photos with an old Nikon F and then a cheap Canon digital to save having to scan prints and negatives. Florian Kaps [one of the founders of The Impossible Project] had been trying to contact me. I googled for info about The Impossible Project. Then Florian told me about the project over lunch.

My first response to being asked to do the packaging for The Impossible Project was: I’d like that. It’s good to be back in the saddle again after all these years.

You know that heart surgeon DeBakey and caricaturist Al Hirschfield each worked until the day before they died, one at 100 and the other a day before his 100th.

I immediately knew I could tackle the packaging for The Impossible Project. It has to be acceptable to Florian and I have never done anything for him before, so who can predict?

I told him that while I can’t guarantee the next job will be as wonderful, I know from past experience that I can turn out more good stuff than bad over the course of weeks and months. It’s not like rugby or your football where getting a ball into a net determines success or failure.

What’s your current vision for the new packaging? Is it likely to echo your earlier work? And given the way you’ve highlighted Apple’s design values, do you feel the visual language of packaging design has changed significantly?

Clean. Less is More. Any idiot can cover a box with NEW! and grimacing faces of supposedly pleased customers. It would have to echo my work because I believe that honest (non-derivative) designs should reflect a personal style in the way we can identify a singing voice, musician, painter, cartoonist, writer, et al.

No, Apple hasn’t influenced enough decision makers. American managers come from business schools where they learn to count beans. They are terrified to make aesthetic decisions and a few came to Polaroid meetings with comments such as, “well, my wife likes blue.”

In 1958, I was told “Ernest Dichter says black is a morbid colour.” Well, as it turns out, Dichter the great guru of motivational fucking research, worked with Ford Motor on [one of Ford’s biggest failures] the Edsel!

Paul Giambarba blogs at giam.typepad,com