Elmo box

Packaging that reads badly on the shelf is a design failure with an identifiable cause: the artwork is approved as a flat sheet and sold as a three-dimensional object. A window cut for a toy's face, a die line that folds a word in half, a photograph that is only correct from one angle — all of them look fine in a proof and wrong on a shelf under supermarket lighting.

The usual remedy is a physical mock-up handled by someone who did not draw it, in the light the product will actually sit in, next to the competitors it will sit beside. Photographs like this one are the record of what happens when that step is skipped. The entry is kept in the image archive; the photographer is unknown.