Absurdnost (Student Project)

Derrick Lin

Global

Designer: Juan Manuel Corredor
Project Type: Student Project
School: Academy of Art University
Course: MFA in Graphic Design
Tutor: Wioleta Kaminska
Location: United States
Packaging Contents: Vodka
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Glass, Paper
Printing Process: Digital Printing, Gold Leaf

I started off with a poem in a foreign language and we were required to make visual interpretations without knowing what the poem was about, the idea was to base the translations on what the letterforms transmitted to me. Then the teacher gave us the English version of the poem and It was up to us to use it to enrich our visual translations or not. After different experiments, for the outcome of the project, we were allowed to come up with anything that we thought was appropriate, so I decided to do packaging inspired by the poem and what I would think would be an appropriate response to it.

Absurdnost is a bottle of Vodka inspired by French philosopher Albert Camus and his thoughts on the absurdity of life portrayed in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, as a response to Russian literary critic Vladislav Khodasevich and his poem “Before the Mirror”.

Vladislav appears to go through a middle life crisis, wondering where time has gone and clueless on the kind of person he has become.

Camus came to the conclusion that despite the absence of inherent meaning in life, one most build its own reasons to attach to it.

The bottle represents the conflict of those ideas and becomes a visual translation of it.

What’s Unique?
The design of the bottle at first glance looks like another packaging project where the idea was to emulate what It could be a product in the real world, but I wanted to play a little with it since the project was so experimental and I design the label so It speaks of the philosophical inquiries of Albert Camus. I use phrases such as: “Masterfully Crafted with Scrutiny” or “Thoughtful Reflections” and more. I used gold leaf in the bottle so it looks like the item is worn out and is slowly losing all the gold. Just as people when time goes by, we lose many things in life but that is precisely what makes us interesting and unique, just like the bottle itself is its lack of perfect gold cover what makes it interesting.