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Flambeau, ArtBin Parent Company, Celebrates 75th Anniversary

Do design students still carry any of this stuff?

By Rain Noe - February 28, 2023

in Organization | design.edu

If you went to design school in the '90s, this ought to bring back some memories:

Graphic artist Peter Whitley has been using those since then, and still does. The modern-day design student, however, is more likely to be toting one of these:

That's ArtBin's current art supply box, which comes in both two-tray and three-tray variants (retailing for $30 and $33, respectively). We're bringing these up because we've just learned that Flambeau, parent company of ArtBin, is celebrating their 75th anniversary.

ArtBin themselves are a bit younger, at 46 years of age; Flambeau, a specialist in injection molding and blow molding, figured they'd marshal those production methods in the service of art supply storage in 1977.

The brand is still going strong, and today they make hundreds of art storage objects ranging from sketch clipboards to transparent totes with individual removable compartments to pencil cases to marker organizers to transparent-lidded magnetic-base storage cases for holding blades that won't move around in transit.

One obsolete object that ArtBin no longer carries, is the drafting storage tube we ID students had to carry. It telescoped so you could accommodate even 36" drawings and keep them safe on the subway. It's been long enough since the company made them that I couldn't even find a picture of an ArtBin-branded model (and mine is somewhere in a shop closet, dutifully storing dowels). Here are some photos of the non-ArtBin models I could find, to give younger readers an idea:

My question to current-day design students: While the tube is obviously history, do you all still carry the tackle boxes and marker organizers around, or has it gone all digital?

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Ryan Cee

a year ago

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I've got a microATX-format desktop and a drawing monitor I bought because the system itself was far higher performance than any comparably priced laptop, and with the drawing monitor I have no need for an attached screen. It's theoretically portable if it weren't for the 5-4 meters of cables between the system, monitor, as well as brick power supplies for both. Having to unplug, store, take out, plug, and repeat the spaghetti pile twice for every trip makes it less portable than I'd hoped. It'd be great if I could just place the whole setup into a box without unplugging everything. Unfortunately, with the concept of LAN parties being a thing of the pass there doesn't seem to be any container that could help with this.

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- Dee An
  
  Ryan Cee
  
  a year ago
  
  Z
  
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  Pelican make rugged cases for the military. They have a conputer flight case that unfolds into a ready-to-use workstation. You might find a solution there.
  
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Isaac Doubek

a year ago

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I'm in the ID department at my local college fairly regularly and see plenty of students with various tackle box style art supply containers. My partner is doing her masters in architecture which shares the same building, and she definitely has to have a tube, but I believe I've see the ID undergrads with tubes as well.

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