Carton
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Image:Brique lait dsc04430.jpg Carton is the name of certain objects typically made from the material cardboard, the word's original (French) meaning.
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Artistic design
In art history, the carton (pronounced the French way) was a drawing on ordinary cardboard, used as life-size design for the manufacture in an atelier of a valuable tapissery, such as a gobelin. During the weaving it hung behind the tapissery in the making, a time-consuming process thus in a creative sense simplified to 'mechanical' painting-by-numbers.
As these were extremely valuable, often commanded by the very richest art-buyers, including princes who hung them in their palaces and even took them on their travels as prestigious displays of wealth, often with a visual message, especially the world-famous Flemish ateliers were deemed worthy to have cartons made by some of the greatest graphic artists of the time, including such celebrated painters as Rubens.
Lightweight packaging
type of packaging, generally for food. They come in many different appearance; milk cartons are upright boxes with spouts, egg cartons are long boxes with cups to hold the eggs upright.
Shape
Although quite often shaped like a cuboid, it is not uncommon to find cartons lacking right angles and straight edges, as in squrounds used for ice cream. The number of corners on any given carton is a function of the product it contains. For example, a product with eight vertices would require a box also with eight corners. Exceptions to this rule are irregularly shaped products, like televisions, in which case styrofoam inserts are used to standardize the shape.
Materials
Despite the name, cartons can be made from many materials, and in fact are often a composite.
Most common is the familiar corrugated cardboard, made by folding cardboard into a rough semblance of a sine wave, and then pressing it between two more pieces of cardboard. Because of the triangular shape of the cavities, the addition of corrugation greatly increases the strength of the container.
Often, cartons are made out of a single piece of cardboard, when the strength of corrugated cardboard isn't needed. Quite often this cardboard is waxed to form a moisture barrier. This may serve to contain a liquid product or keep a powder dry.
Plastics are another common packaging material since they can be molded in to a container of almost any shape.
Content
A wide variety of produccts, mainly foods, are sold in cartons. The following are a few examples:
- eggs
- milk
- juice
- artificially flavored water
- condensed chicken soup
- condensed beef broth
Labeling
The labels on cartons contain information. Much of this information is considered useful by many people, because it is very informative. For example, many labels have featured the following:
- label - indicative of the name, contents and producer of the carton.
- nutritional information - bearer of bad news in many households.
- contact instructions - how to contact the manufacturer in a complicated way involving hand-drawn facsimiles.
- ingredients - exposes the public to terms like propylene glycol for the first time.
- sometimes unrelated essages, notablymissing people - Have you seen me?
- contests - again, hand drawn facsimiles are involved. Self-addressed stamped envelopes are also often required.