The Assignment
A full-page product packaging advertisement. Period: 1983. Format: the front face of a retail box, the kind you would find on a shelf at Sears or K-Mart. The product is a clock radio. It is also a surveillance device. The packaging does not know this. The packaging is completely sincere.
The horror is domestic. It is sitting on a night table. The red numbers say 7:05. It has been there for years.
Visual
Gray background. Classic blue header text. The illustration of the clock itself is highly realistic but slightly faded — the degradation of packaging that has been on a shelf too long, or found at a thrift store, or pulled from a box in someone’s basement. It must look like a real object. Not a prop. A product.
The clock: A classic rectangular faux-woodgrain alarm clock, centre of frame. LED display reading 7:05 in red. The GE logo on the clock face and the top-left corner of the box should mimic the classic cursive script — but the loops of the letters subtly form an infinity symbol or a closed circuit. This easter egg should reward close inspection without announcing itself.
The anatomy lines: Thin blue lines radiate from the clock to labelled callouts around the frame, exactly mimicking 1980s consumer electronics schematic packaging. The lines are the visual grammar of trustworthy corporate design. Use them accordingly.
Header
Top left: General Entity
Centred: AM/FM Electronic Digital Clock Radio
Font: clean, clinical 1980s sans-serif. Helvetica or equivalent. The text starts reading like standard consumer electronics copy and does not stop reading like that — until the reader reads it.
The Callouts
Each connected by a thin blue line to the corresponding feature on the clock.
Footer — Bottom Right Corner
Standard tiny corporate manufacturing boilerplate. Render it exactly as such.
Vertex Consumer Electronics, Inc. P.O. Box 1976, Indianapolis, Indiana 46206 Made in the Dark. 7-4612BK
Tone Reference
The entire piece must be indistinguishable from a genuine 1983 retail product box until the reader reads the callouts. The gray background, the blue headers, the schematic lines, the corporate footer — all of it must be period-perfect. The callouts do not escalate dramatically. They begin with normal product language and end with surveillance horror using the same flat, informational tone throughout. The Snooz-Alarm line and the battery back-up line are the spine of the piece. Everything else is scaffolding.
To discuss this brief: submissions@astoundingtales.ca