Take a Seat: Classic Chair Design and the 2014 Pickle Calendar
You may remember I wrote a post back in November about the calendar I designed for my work, Pickle Design, celebrating great chair design. We were well into the swing of 2014 by this point and many of my favourites had come and gone.
The challenge was to create something that would connect with our existing clients and help us meet new ones. Every year at Pickle Design we create a calendar around a different theme. In the past this had taken the form of pin badges, colour wheels, concertina folds charting a line of thought and dictionary definitions; this time it was classic chair design.
Ideas and inspiration come in many forms. I am slightly addicted to Pinterest, but I also get ideas from going for walks, bouncing thoughts off other people and looking at the wider design world. Art, film, architecture and fashion can influence me just as much as graphic design. It all feeds in.
For this calendar, some stunning pieces of chair design caught my eye, from the wonderfully sculptural furniture of Le Corbusier to Arne Jacobsen’s graceful Swan Chair.
This month’s star was Frank Gehry’s cardboard Wiggle Chair. I illustrated each design icon in just two colours, giving the A2 poster a real retro feel.
We also designed desktop calendars for each month, including a September 2014 calendar to download. At the time my thoughts were already turning to 2015, when a completely different poster idea was beginning to form. It was refreshing designing something that wasn’t bound by time and space!
Looking back, the fascination with classic design clearly stuck. We revisited the idea in our Design Classics post in 2016, and nearly a decade later returned to it for our 2025 Design Classics calendar, this time broadening the collection beyond chairs. At Pickle, those design classics have since grown into a wider series of illustrated features and infographics.
Some inspiration images came via Pinterest and Yellowtrace. The chair illustrations are my original artwork from the 2014 Pickle Design calendar.
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