Interviews with Randy Ludacer

Sometimes making one small change to an existing design seems to change everything.

Adding just one more egg to a regular carton of 12 is stupid, of course. Who really needs that one extra egg? Honestly, it’s an unnecessary caprice, so far as "consumer demand" is concerned.

But, as an idea, it was something that I just wanted to see. How should the eggs be arranged? What would it look like?

Initially, I was focused on the idea that a hexagonal arrangement might be more efficient. I even claimed, at one point that I was fitting more eggs into a smaller area.

This turned out to all wrong for a variety of reasons. It was a meaningless calculation, for one thing, offering no practical benefit to a world of rectangular boxes, trucks and supermarket display cases.

When faced with the prospect, that this carton was actually going to be manufacture, my focus had to abruptly shift for capricious to practical problem-solving.

Exactly how big should the inner egg compartment to gently hold each egg in place? Not too tight, but not so loose that they rattle around inside. Ultimately, we wound up making our egg carton larger than a regular dozer pack, in order to accommodate a wider range of different egg sizes. (Since making Baker’s Dozen™ Egg Cartons in different sizes for different sized eggs, was certainly not in our launch budget!)

From my first sketches (in 2012) to production of our (now award-winning) Baker’s Dozen™ Egg Carton, it took about seven years. Of course, as an ongoing project, it’s easy to imagine that I might still need to make further design changes or improvements.

This idea was never commissioned. It was never a ”work-for-hire.” If anything, it was more like me "feeding the internet” in hopes of gaining attention for our small design firm. It began as novel packaging concept to attract internet eyeballs. And my only justification for ever working on it in the first place, was that is might lead to more business.

But, as is often the case these days, internet eyeballs and actual business do not always go hand in hand. I got a fair amount of online attention for the egg carton idea in 2012 — Bon Appetit, Huffington Post, but no real business opportunities presented themselves.

Not until I got a call in 2015 from Chad Wegener of Willow Valley Farms in Nebraska. Chad was calling to see if he could purchase some cartons. And I had to tell him what I’d told so many others: that the product didn’t really exist.

The thing is, I HAD found a source for molded pulp egg cartons but had not taken the next step. If he really wanted Baker’s Dozen Egg Cartons, I suggested to Chad, "why not partner with us?”

In 2015, our design firm (BEACH) formed a partnership with Willow Valley Farms of Nebraska. We named that partnership: "Baker's Dozen Egg Cartons, LLC.”

Our plan, at first, was to sell the cartons online to small poultry farms, but we’ve recently decided to try something else, instead.

Willow Valley Farms will be using the cartons exclusively, establishing a distinctive brand for their egg farm in the Omaha area.

We might consider some additional licensing arrangements sometime in the future, but Willow Valley Farms has a good supply of the cartons and will be launching soon.

This question, reminds me another important thing I learned while trying to promote the 13-egg carton to large egg producers.

Early on, a few big companies had expressed interest, but their egg-packing machinery was only designed to pack eggs in pairs. They could only handle “even" numbers like, 6, 12 or 18 eggs. For them to pack an “odd” number like 13 eggs, however, they would need a major retooling investment. (Something they were probably smart not to take on — for the dubious benefit of 1 extra egg!)

This meant that, for the time being, our target customer is the small egg-producer who pack their eggs by hand. (Farm-stands, farmer’s markets and the like.)

So much about the design depends on the name. And on consumers understanding what it means. A “baker’s dozen” is not a normal dozen of 12. It is always exactly 13. The idiom was first coined in 1599, and it refers to "the practice of medieval English bakers giving an extra loaf when selling a dozen in order to avoid being penalized for selling short weight.”

So if you know what a “baker’s dozen” is, then you understand what a perfect name it is for a 13-pack egg carton.

Let’s see… first I used a pencil and paper to work out what the inside partitions might look like. Then I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to make a more realistic simulation. Later, when we were working with a molded pulp supplier, we needed to employ 3D tools and 3D printing (for prototype samples).

I hired Mark Armer of Armer Design & Engineering in California to build the 3D model for us.

And Chad's brother-in-law had access to 3D printing, a service that he generously donated to us.

Providing a 3D model turned out to be an absolute requirement for the manufacturer.

I had always imagined, that since my concept was a slight reshuffling of a traditional egg carton, that manufacturer of egg cartons would know best how to engineer it. They would simply need to follow my design sketches, and voila!

That, of course, is not how it’s done. So we needed the 3D modeling and printing technology. And having the 1st 3D-printed model, was a gratifying proof of concept, but also a good (early) opportunity to make some improvements. We made some revisions—removing some of the pillars, making the whole carton a tiny bit larger, etc.

It was an impulsive decision. We had just launched the Baker’s Dozen Egg Carton website. And my thought was to promote the business and its distinctive egg carton.

I hadn’t understood how much work A’ Design requires of its applicants.

I was more used to the sort of contests where you make a submission and then simple wait for the results.

A’ Design, however, was constantly hectoring me about different ways in which I might improve my application! So many online forms to fill out! I must confess that I was, at times, peeved by all this. (Especially, if I was super busy with other work!)

Now that I’m a “silver medalist," however, it turns out to have been worth the extra work.

I’d like to thank the folks at A’ Design for soldiering on during our shared global pandemic. I hope they’ve been to do this safely. I know that they’re based in Italy, which (like NYC where I am) has been hit hard by Covid-19.

I attended Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1977. RISD, of course would have been a great place to study graphic design. I had friends who majored in that subject. I was painting major and never took a single class in that department.

Although I did paint the some of the walls in the building as part of my work study job. So maybe something rubbed off on me.

Good question.

I think we all form our earliest aspirations, based on our understanding of the world and our place in it at the time. And being young, we might even take some parental advice.

I remember, as a kid, that I desired an art career of some sort. I was persuaded, for a while, that architecture might be a practical, yet creative career. And with that in mind I sought out mechanical drawing classes in high school and did pretty well. But then we moved and my new school didn’t offer mechanical drawing. Which (to me, at the time) meant that I would not become an architect, after all.

So I spent the rest of my high school years making paintings. I continued this in college, although my paintings evolved into conceptual art. (And I also wanted began playing in a band and started to write songs.)

After graduation, I looked in the NY Time classifieds for jobs listed under “ARTIST” and found employment as a paste-up artist for a textbook publisher. This led to a few years of freelance work. Nothing you’d call “creative,” although my wife (partner at BEACH) and I created “mechanicals” for printing — as directed by “art directors.”

Eventually we bought a computer and started calling ourselves designers. Learning on the job, as it were.

So was being a designer my choice? I certainly can’t sit here and say that being a designer was my FIRST choice.

But was I forced into it? It’s not someone held a gun to my head and said: DESIGN! But life does have a way of forcing people to change their plans. (Repeatedly, I find!)

Lately, I’m mostly called upon to design the graphics for printed packaging—insert cards, folding cartons, labels and the like.

Sometimes (but less often), I’m asked for structural packaging design. I’d like to do more of that part. I think there’s a lot of polyhedral options, that would be fascinating to use in packaging. Some polyhedra are, of course, are too complex. The challenge is to find a structure that can be made in simple enough way, that it can be done within a reasonable budget.

I’d also like to design more food packaging.

First, take some risks. And then survive. Be curious. But get old. (Because “young legend” is oxymoronic!)

While I appreciate the idea that we should all strive to be the best we can be, I find something about this question a little mean-spirited.

Being a good designer, after all, is something anyone ought to be proud of. Why parse greatness at the expense of goodness? I say: good-great, potato-potahto. (Let’s call the whole thing off!)

I agree with those who say a good design is a good solution to a design problem. 9 times out of 10, this “solution" will be the simplest, and most direct. Or should, at least, appear that way, even if there are underlying complexities in the process leading to up to it.

I once planned to build a model of Erik Demaine’s “Hinged Dissection” font—a square cut up into 128 hinged pieces that could rearranged into each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. I went so far as to buy the balsa wood, but that’s as far as I got.Now that I think of it, this would have been a needlessly "old school" approach. Really it should be an animation—a square transforming itself from an “A” to a “B” and so on...

I was obsessed, for a time, by Robert Sidney Dickens, Chicago based designer of the original TaB logo.

I love the variegated, plastic Fissan bottles by Giulio Cittato.

I’ve long admired Walter Landor’s 1955 “tilt bottle” for Arrowhead & Puritas water.

And the no-nonsense simplicity of Meg Crane’s home pregnancy kit design.

Some of my favorite designs were apparently created by anonymous designers. (Or else I just can’t figure who designed them.) The 1955 S.O.S box, for example. Or the transparent overlapping Valvoline logo from the 1960s.

I may be too self-deprecating, but just cannot start a sentence with “my greatest design is…” Just can’t do it.

I will instead say that I’ve designed one or two things where the quality has been, perhaps, under-estimated.

The Gumball Puzzle Cube Pack, for one. The Totally Living “Shirt Card” for another.

Funny that you should ask. By "all the awards,” I must assume that you mean BOTH of the awards: all 2 of them! (The one that I won in elementary school for designing the school's crest in 1965. And the more recent A’ Design Silver Award in Packaging.)

I cannot pretend to be widely (or even narrowly) recognized. And I am certainly not famous or even infamous. Why such flattering questions? But, OK, I’ll bite: "Yes it is hard to be famous. Maybe too hard, as I have not yet actually managed to do it!

Technically, my very first graphic design project was as a child, when I designed the winning school “Crest” for my elementary school. Being a graphic designer, however, was never an early aspiration. I had harbored hopes of becoming an architect or perhaps a fine artist.

Graphic design (and packaging design) was something that we just clumsily stumbled into.

BEACH is literally a “mom and pop shop.” Deborah Davis and I have been married since 1982 and business partners since 1990. Our home-based design firm is named after the street where we live and work. Namely: BEACH.

We started out as “Beach Street Design.” In those day, we were more like “general practitioners,” handling brochures, catalogs, logos, business cards, etc.

Eventually we became specialists in package design and related branding, changing our name to "Beach Packaging Design." (Later shortening it to just “BEACH".)

Ideally, design work is problem solving. But, of course, not everyone will agree on what the problem is, and some solutions are in the eye of the beholder. In some ways, however, the marketplace will ultimately decide which solutions work best.

Still, it can be dispiriting if (what one thinks is) the best solution gets shot down to soon in the elimination process.

I like it best when I arrive at a solution, with no preconceived idea about how it should look. Structural packaging projects are often like that. Having more to do with materials and process and less to do with decoration.

I think our first project was some sort of line-art graphic (a baseball & bat) that we designed for Macy’s Corporate Packaging sometome around 1990.

If I remember correctly, it was also the first artwork created with our new graphic design computer: a Macintosh IIci

I think mornings are best for creative thinking. Later in the day, my productivity becomes more mechanized and repetitive tasks become my wheelhouse.

Honestly, I don’t consider the designer any more responsible “for society and the environment” than any other occupation. As humans, I would agree that we all bear some degree of shared responsibility.

We are pretty flexible. We try to hit the ground running and we’re naturally curious about new products being invented and brought to market. We’re not shy about suggesting things, but we’re not "prima donnas.” If a client wants something very specific, we’ll usually try and and accommodate them. It’s still a business, after all, as much as we’d like it to be purely creative.

In house, we have a team of two partners. We both design, and we each handle our own accounts. Deborah also handles product photography, while I do most of the photoshop work—retouching etc.

It would be foolish, of course, to forget that the client is also an important part of the "team."

We have our phone number and email links on our website, as well as a contact form, for those who prefer filling out forms. Those who contact us on Facebook, do so at their own peril. (I just don't check it as often as some folks seem to expect!)

Wash your hands. Stay safe. And please wear a mask if you're attending a gala, even if it's not a masquerade!