The amazing packaging made by Pozzoli for The Mars Volta - La realidad de los sueños
They said it couldn’t be done
The challenge: The brief astutely recognizing that after investing large amounts of money in these lavish creations, fans and collectors do not want to simply assign them to a dusty shelf or dark cupboard. Instead, they want to celebrate them and display them as a piece of objects d’art.
The Mars Volta – La realidad de los sueños was one of this.
The challenge launched by Clouds Hill and Yellow Media GmbH to Pozzoli was to create a box that could be displayed at a ‘non-conventional’ angle while containing a huge amount of valuable and heavy items. Crucially, any stand or plinth used to achieve this needed to be part of the box design and not additional. It should not need to be shipped separately or stored within the box (thereby robbing interior capacity). Finally with an eye on sustainability and the reduction of plastics, that plinth needed to be light and plastic free.
Our solution: Working closely with Clouds Hill and Yellow Media GmbH, we developed 3 initial creative executions. After thorough R&D and prototyping and identifying any technical limitation we settled on the final design.
The outer special packaging and plinth is merely 3 elements – a box bottom, lid, and outer neck or ‘quarter slip’ which when removed becomes the plinth. Then, in the pursuit of a piece of objects d’art, this substantial box is then inserted into this plinth by the corner and displayed at perpendicular angle.
However, positioning the box at this unconventional angle means that all exterior artworks must be printed perpendicularly so to be viewed correctly when displayed in the plinth. Yet, adding further design complexity the bottom and top of the main box are cut at an angle, requiring precision printing and engineering of the box to ensure that the intricate artwork aligns perfectly, with no visible overlap or distortion.
Limited to 5,000 copies containing the band’s whole studio discography plus unreleased material, this box sold out immediately.
