The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2021–2022
Holycrap! packs ten years of family art into a tissue box
The family art collective Holycrap! hid a decade of their paintings, words and music in a book-and-cassette edition disguised as a box of tissues.
Holycrap!
What it had to solve
Holycrap!, the family art collective started in 2011 by dad Pann, mum Claire and their children Renn and Aira, had a decade of shared drawings, writing, design and music behind them. They wanted a keepsake that felt like the family itself, not a portfolio.
How it works
Holycrap! is a family art collective started in 2011 by dad Pann, mum Claire and their children Renn and Aira, who paint, write, design and make music together. Their self-made magazine Rubbish Famzine had already given the four of them a shared canvas, and after a decade of work they wanted an object that captured what making things as a family actually felt like.
Blood, Sweat and Tears, the result, looks like an ordinary box of tissues. Lift the tissues and you find a book and an audio cassette: the book is a chronological narrative of the family's shared love for design, from the children's early drawings to the printed pages of Rubbish Famzine, and the cassette carries their music single of the same name. The tissue box is not decoration — it is the reveal the whole object is built around.
The edition joined the D&AD Awards archive in its 2022 annual, where the jury kept returning to the packaging. One judge called it a passion project with soul; another described it as a sentimental letter to the designers' family, cleverly concealed within a tissue box, with the packaging's role in the surprise reveal the thing that cements it as a great piece of design.
Why it lands
- A tissue box is tiny next to a decade of work, so the volume of what is hidden makes the unboxing genuinely surprising.
- The pun is the structure: tissues for the blood, sweat and tears of ten years turn an emotional cliché into a physical moment.
- Everything inside — paintings, words and music — was made by the same four people, so the object reads as intimacy rather than merchandise.
- Hiding the contents forces an act of discovery, which makes each reader unpack the family's story in the order the family chose.
What it did
The edition earned a place in the D&AD Awards archive (2022 annual), where jurors called it 'a passion project with soul' and said the packaging's role in the surprise reveal made it a great piece of design.
What you can take
Make the packaging carry the idea: when the box itself enacts the pun — tissues for the tears of ten years — the reveal does the emotional work no photograph of the product can.
Since then
The edition was filed in the D&AD Awards archive for 2022, with jury comments praising its emotional engagement and the cleverness of the reveal. Blood, Sweat and Tears remains the family's own printed-and-musical record of their first decade together.
Sources
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