Cultural Forces and Commercial Constraints: Designing Packaging in the Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

Two case studies, along with industry publications, interviews and secondary sources, illuminate the nature and role of packaging design in the twentieth-century United States business system. By the time of the Great Depression, packaging had become a large and well-developed industry as changes in retailing and marketing gave the package a central place in the emerging consumer society. Many of the basic patterns set by about 1930 would persist thereafter, including the institutional sources of design for packaging. Market research into consumer preferences and the power of the established culture were the most important factors shaping the design of packaging for the mass market. The economic and technical constraints of package engineering, and gendered and class-based perceptions about both products and consumers, also played significant roles. The aesthetic and broadly political preferences of designers generally were subordinated to business goals in this branch of industrial design.

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