what is good?

Waitrose jilted their reputation to me when I went in and kindly asked if I could photograph some items in their essential range. I had to contact head office..Bracknall?! blast! I then ended up having to thank my mother for her entire trolley of shopping consisting of items from the essential range. Thanks mum.

As soon as my macbook is up and running again I shall slam up the photos followed by some discussion faster than you can say good.

.... Good old tech guys at college are fixing it as I type. The mac room is catering my uploads.

I will start with a selection of essential Waitrose packaging that I think works.

If someone were to argue on the side of simplicity these would be some perfect contenders. Not only do they fit to brand that they are representing by acting up to essential packaging, by being packaging and only packaging, (no frills), they fit to the Superstores clean and sophisticated look whilst still giving across an organic and humble feel.

All of these things have beautiful illustration on them, but this has to be my favourite. I love how the designers aren't afraid of having a completely plain side. They definitely get away with it-even the complete opposite rich in colour and beautifully dense illustration.

Now these are some of the essential range that don't quite fit the bill. Is it that the designer has not quite though through the possibility of not everything can be illustrated with such imaginative and intricate detail. For example, The soured cream doesn't look exactly the most delicious and essentially appetising thing in the world.

Another thing that seems to be a very strong aspect of this packaging that makes me think that everything is not as easy and breezy as the supermarket may seem is the strong presence of inconsistency. The cheesecake above appears to be in the Waitrose own range but does not have the packaging that the majority of the shop has. Is it because the shop is undergoing another change?

Again here we see a fairly similar product, at least in the categorising of the supermarket. You would have thought that in the design of the layout of the supermarket at least they wouldn't put such a obvious clash of packaging next to one another. Perhaps this is an old packaging that hasn't gone through the redesign process? I hope so.

Another one! I was starting to question weather or not this line was welcome in my What is Good project. This has made me feel a little better though. It seems that they are moving quickly and not necessarily to plan. There seems to be so many varieties of completley different design ideas in the store. Maybe if we give them a bit of space they'll will get themselves sorted.

Yet another option. Found this a few days ago and though I would pop it on the end. It made me full of hope and at the same time made me feel a little scared about the future of main stream design. I do like the appearance of the boxes, and I love the fact that they are really small. They look really practical and nice and it makes me feel like I am buying quality and value for money. However, I think this is a slight insight to what might happen on the larger scale of design. Are we going to loose tough with the more hand rendered style? We will have to wait and see.