Gromm•It: Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum

I hadn't opened a pack of Wrigley's Spearmint in many years and was surprised to find that it's now green instead of off-white. When did that happen? Also, it seems odd that the packaging shows a double-pointed arrow — that visual device had always been reserved for Doublemint gum, while Wrigley's Spearmint always had a single-pointed arrow. Not sure when this changed, but I find it strangely upsetting, as if one of the universe's eternal verities has been upended.

(Special thanks to Mary Bakija for suggesting this one.)

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Other Projects
by Paul Lukas

• Uni Watch is an obsessive look at the world of sports uniform and logo design.

• Naming Wrongs is a line of T-shirts that pushes back against the selling of stadium and arena naming rights to corporate interests.

• Permanent Record began as an inquiry into the stories behind a batch of 1920s and ’30s report cards that were found in a discarded file cabinet, and has now expanded to become a broader examination of found objects and the stories they have to tell.

• Key Ring Chronicles is a crowd-sourced project that explores the stories behind objects that people keep on their key rings.

• Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, a zine published from 1993 through 2000, looked at consumer culture in excruciatingly close detail. Its first six issues were compiled into the book Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure (Crown, 1997).

• My Pet Troll documents the relationship between a writer/webmaster and his most persistent and bellicose troll.

• The Candela Structures, a collaboration with the architect Kirsten Hively, documents the surprisingly complicated history of a set of super-cool fiberglass structures in Queens, New York.

• One-Man Focus Group, a weekly column that ran on The New Republic’s website in 2013, took a close look at the worlds of consumer culture, design, and branding.

• The Forewords, a collaboration with the writer Liz Clayton, are a lecture/slideshow "band" that has opened for the Magnetic Fields and performed while sitting in very high chairs, among other career highlights.

• Show & Tell was a live storytelling series in which participants were encouraged to bring an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes.

• Fire Wayne Hagin Already! chronicled the on-air foibles of a particularly incompetent baseball radio broadcaster and advocated for his dismissal.

• Lost in America, a monthly travel column focusing on road-tripping, Americana, regional subcultures, and the like, appeared in Money magazine from 1998 through 2004. Unfortunately, most of the entries are no longer available on the internet.

• While not a distinct project per se, these articles written for the now-dormant design website re:Form all explore slightly eccentric topics, such as the design of membership cards, things that make a “click!” when they snap shut, and giant fiberglass animals.

Want to know more about any of this? Contact Paul Lukas.

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