PERHAPS THE MOST successful package redesign of all time was that done for Marlboro cigarettes in 1955 by the designer Frank Gianninoto. The Marlboro cigarette had existed previously in a white pack covered with weak graphic elements and a lot of copy. It was associated with women, at a time when buyers of filter cigarettes <a href="vonderhain.com/marlboro">Cigarettes Online</a> were most likely to be women. But filters were beginning to catch on with men too, and the redesign was prompted by the desire of Philip Morris, the tobacco company, to have a filter cigarette that would appeal to all. Gianninoto's simplification was, in fact, very like the Campbell's soup can -- red on top, white on the bottom, with a coat of arms that like Campbell's gold medal, tends to disappear. The white meets the red as an arrow pointing upward, a very simple graphic device visible on even the snowiest television set.

Perhaps the most radical part of Gianninoto's design was the new physical form it gave the package. Rather than the familiar cigarette pack made of paper, with a foil liner and cellophane wrapper, Marlboro sported a cardboard box with a top that flipped open. The early advertising jingle promised "filter, flavor, flip-top box," an indication that the company thought the box would be perceived as something special. There was a certain implication that people living a rugged life in Marlboro Country needed a tougher cigarette pack in their pockets, but the advantages of this novel pack -- beyond its novelty -- were never fully explained. The English design critic Reyner Banham theorized in 1962 that the real purpose of the box was to prevent people from removing their cigarettes easily from the package.

"The last time a cigarette is even Brand-X is in the act of being extracted from the packet -- after that it is strictly Brand Zero," Banham wrote. Opening the flip top was, he went on, "a mechanical ritual to be performed each time with the pack in view." Thus, Banham argued, the package served to remind a smoker what brand he preferred, even though "the corners of the hard box when stuffed into the traditional American shirt pocket dig into the surrounding rolls of affluent flesh every time he folds himself into the driving sear of his car."