There was this inside joke that began in the Calderwood days, 1958 or thereabouts, whereby one of the MBAs -- and it didn't matter if they were from Harvard or MIT, or Wharton, or Tuck -- would come into a meeting where I would be showing off my package designs, and they would quote Ernst Dichter about black being a morbid color. Yes, I know, I mentioned that before. Well, once they realized that this was the way it was going to be with black end panels, one of them would invariably come up with the non sequitur that his wife, in point of fact, likes blue. Not indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, turquoise, just blue. Thereafter, every time things got hairy, someone would break up an argument with "you know, my wife likes blue," and peace was restored.
So, you can imagine my chagrin when, after 25 years of the designs you've seen elsewhere here, and within months of my being sent into exile, various deep tints of blue became the background for all of Polaroid's hardware and film packaging. I had never realized how insidious this had become until just yesterday when I began searching on the Internet and found the examples which follow.
This is what happened when Polaroid management in its wisdom decided that a logo would solve all of their problems. They got rid of that freelance designer who did what he called product identity, and let their in-house art department do it all with the logo at the top, or, uh, you know, somewhere, and those numbers, which meant so much to all of them.
