Design Classics: Our 2025 Pickle Calendar
I thought I would share the calendar we produced at Pickle Design for 2025. We've been creating these limited-edition calendars as gifts for clients and local businesses for around 20 years, and coming up with a new theme each time has become something of a tradition.
Over the years we've illustrated everything from collective nouns for birds and time travel to an alphabet of graphic design, Cornish food and drinks from around the world. In 2014 we devoted the calendar entirely to iconic chairs, so for 2025 we decided to revisit the idea of design classics, but this time broaden things out. We’d also returned to the subject in 2016, asking what makes an iconic design a true design classic.
We chose twelve objects whose shapes have become so familiar that you can recognise them from surprisingly little information. The Anglepoise lamp and Coca-Cola bottle are perfect examples. Rather than draw each object in full, we reduced them to partial silhouettes, leaving just enough for your brain to fill in the gaps.
I love that moment when something suddenly becomes recognisable. Strip away the logo, detail and decoration and a really successful piece of design often still has a silhouette all of its own.
Choosing the twelve was probably the hardest part. What actually makes a design a classic? Longevity certainly helps, but I think it is also about objects that have moved beyond simply doing their job and become part of our visual culture.
Picking the colour palette is always one of my favourite parts. We wanted each illustration to have its own personality while still feeling like part of the same set, so the colours are deliberately bold but restrained enough to let those distinctive shapes do the work.
We also made each month available as a free digital download, so the illustrations could live beyond the printed calendar as backgrounds for phones, tablets and computers. That has become another nice part of the Pickle calendar tradition.
Looking back, this was one of those themes that could easily have carried on for another year. There are an awful lot of design classics we reluctantly had to leave out.
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