Roasted Garlic Herb Hazelnuts Option A – Fireworks

This is a package I designed for a hazelnut product for Oregon State University’s Food Science Department. It’s Option A of the label, Roasted Garlic Herb, and the page opens on the bag before it has a label at all. It’s just a ziplock bag and nuts.

Everything that makes it a product has been squeezed into small knots on a shelf underneath. The knots are lined up in the order I stacked the layers in Illustrator. The photograph comes first, then the orange bands, then the type. Run your finger or cursor along the shelf from left to right. Each knot you push climbs, bursts, and its pieces fly out to where they belong on the bag. One sweep builds the label from the bottom of the stack to the top, which is more or less how I built it.

• Set them all off launches every knot without you.
• Pack it up again squeezes the label back down onto the shelf.

The photograph is a live trace of about 2,500 little shapes, so when it goes up it arrives like a mosaic. Each line of type travels as its own small pile of letters, sitting on a chip the color it lands on. That keeps the white and cream type visible on the shelf.

Where this comes from

It’s the same machinery as Samurai Fireworks, which started with Guillermo Restrepo’s paper on groups that act together. This time the order comes from my own Illustrator layers, and so do most of the groups. The computer only decides how to split the photograph into five. Claude and I built it in an afternoon.