Vintage Food Packaging: Our Illustrated 2019 Calendar
Every year at Pickle Design we create a calendar to send to our clients. We tend to settle on a theme, turn it into an A2 poster and then spend the year unpacking it a little further.
For 2019 we delved back into packaging's past and illustrated twelve British cupboard classics. I often use the computer to create vector illustrations, but this time I picked up my pen and started scribbling.
Packaging has always fascinated me. We see these tins, boxes, jars and bottles every day without really looking at them, but once you start studying the details there is so much going on: colour, lettering, illustration, shape and all those little things that make a brand instantly recognisable.
Lyle's Golden Syrup was a perfect place to start. When we researched the tin we discovered just how little its familiar green and gold appearance had changed over the years. Even when the details of packaging evolve, it is amazing how a colour, shape or piece of lettering can carry an identity through generations.
That became one of my favourite things about the whole project. Drawing the old packs made me look much more closely at what had survived and what had disappeared.
Colman's is a brilliant example. Its distinctive yellow packaging appeared in the nineteenth century and that combination of yellow, red and black still feels completely familiar. The old tin is busier and more decorative, but you don't need to see the name for long before you know exactly what you're looking at.
Across the calendar we moved through Lyle's Golden Syrup, Marmite, Colman's Mustard, Twinings Tea, McVitie's Digestives, Tiptree Strawberry Jam, HP Sauce, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Hovis, Cadbury Dairy Milk, Bird's Custard and finally Bisto.
Researching each one threw up lovely little bits of design history. Twinings has an extraordinarily enduring logo, Tiptree kept its fruit names handwritten for decades and later commissioned a typeface based on that handwriting, while Hovis worked with illustrators including Mabel Lucie Attwell, Heath Robinson and Tom Eckersley.
Cadbury was another favourite to draw. That glorious purple immediately dominates the pack, but I particularly love all the hand-drawn lettering and tiny decorative details in the older design. It is much less polished than the packaging we know now, and all the better for it.
Looking at all twelve together, what I love most is the riot of colour. These are products we might barely notice as we reach into a cupboard, but their packaging has become part of our visual memory.
We have since gathered the whole project together on the Pickle Design 2019 calendar page, where you can explore all twelve monthly illustrations and the stories behind them.
I think getting the pens out was definitely the right decision.
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