Remaking a Classic PACKAGING DESIGN

The 13-egg carton was a design exercise for Randy Ludacer. Then an egg farmer called.

Randy Ludacer likes tweaking classics. As a graphic and packaging designer, he’s designed a package for coat hangers that resembles a shirt, a puzzle cube-like box that holds souvenir candies, and a pasta sauce label whose barcode wraps around a fork like spaghetti. But he had no client or market in mind when he was fooling around on the web one day and thinking about egg cartons.

Why not, he wondered, make a carton for a baker’s dozen of eggs? Not that it would have any practical benefits. After all, he had no egg farms as clients. He quickly realized that supermarket shelves weren’t made for odd shaped cartons. Still, it would be great publicity for Beach, the New York City branding and package design firm he owns with his wife, Deborah Davis. Drawing from patent designs for existing egg cartons, he made a sketch, put it up on his design blog BoxVox, and forgot about it.

“I’d always been interested in polyhedrons, and it just occurred to me that you could arrange eggs differently. It was surprisingly easy to do with paper,” said Ludacer.