FOUNDER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR
GUACAMOLE AIRPLANE, SAN FRANCISCO CA
Ian Montgomery is the Founder and Creative Director of Guacamole Airplane, a San-Francisco based design agency focused on sustainable packaging. Guacamole Airplane’s general projects cover structural packaging design and sustainability consulting, and their clients include Harry’s, Nike, Whole Foods, and Dell. Ian did his undergraduate coursework in Environmental Science at Stanford and masters work in Packaging Design at Pratt, and his studio pursues work from a shared interest in sustainable material innovation, packaging manufacturing, origami, climate science, 1970’s hippie modernism, and the unique opportunities of modern industry to work towards decarbonization.
As we pivot into a post-pandemic era marked by societal challenge and change, are you optimistic about the future of Graphic Design to support and shape commerce, culture and causes? Why do you feel the way you do? Are you optimistic about the future of your own firm?
I’m incredibly excited about this new era of sustainable material innovation. The investment and advancement we’re seeing with new plastic alternatives, biofoams, coatings, and fibers is astounding. After WWII, a similar explosion of new materials, namely plastics, gave architects, product designers, and packaging designers completely new building blocks to radically reshape society. This decade’s designers are the first to have access to a completely new suite of biomaterials that will similarly reshape the world, ideally tempered with a bit less overconsumption. Yvon Chouinard said “do no unnecessary harm”, and that’s about the best we can aim for, luckily for us designers low carbon or even carbon-negative polymers, paperstocks made from agricultural waste instead of virgin pulp, bio based films, and low carbon methods of manufacturing have opened to doors for truly thoughtful products that wouldn’t have been possible even ten years ago. I’m optimistic about the future of design, so long as young designers take the time to educate themselves about the ecological implications present in their mass produced work. Paul Hawken’s “Drawdown”, Brian Dougherty’s “Green Graphic Design”, and Tom Szaky’s “The Future of Packaging” are books I suggest to design students to read.
We are seeing an increased focus on Package Design to advance the brand, tell the story, amplify the experience, forge an emotional connection. Do you agree with this observation and, if so, what advantages does packaging have over other graphic communications?
Packaging is unique in that it’s both a functional protective vessel and an emotive canvas for graphic messaging. We’re not super conscious of graphic trends in our work, but instead we have more of a form follows function approach, working with new substrates like seaweed films, algae inks, and agricultural waste papers to see what unique low impact forms and printing styles we can accomplish in the context of large scale manufacturing while doing the least possible harm.
