Packaging — Blog — The Disciples Of Design

The Sainsbury Archive is an online repository of the supermarket chain’s history containing everything from photographs to examples of advertising from the company’s 100+ years. Particularly fascinating for designers is the wealth of packaging material on here, with hundreds of examples of Sainsbury’s own brand designs.

What we have here is no less than the story of UK consumer communication, where the timeline interface can be used to discover the changing design trends and impact of new production process right through the 20th century. The work of Peter Dixon’s in-house team is particularly fascinating, each 1000’s of new product packaging was introduced or re-designed, each with their own distinct graphic approach. As well as pictures, much of the packaging is shown as flat artwork proofs which will be of interests to students of 3D design. Aside from packaging, the photographs of store fronts, press and poster ads an even old editions of the Sainbury’s in-house packaging allow from the trace the evolution of how one of the countries biggest retail brands have communicated with it’s audience. This is a fantastic resource for research into any design project.

Tom Shaughnessy, Design Director at Glorious and also friend of the course has shared with us an agency called Stranger & Stranger. They're an agency who somehow slipped through the net on my radar, but are definitely worth sharing with you. Specialising in packaging and branding they are an agency who create - rather, craft - exceptional and exquisite pieces of design.

Mainly for the alcoholic drinks industry, they design the labels, bottles, packs and everything that falls under their client's brand. It's worth spending some time understanding and appreciating the level of craft and detail through typeface selection, illustration style through the idea and the actual end product itself. They also have an interesting design mantra:

DON’T FIT IN, STAND OUT ™

They've also designed and printed a beautiful book featuring a few hundred of the four and half thousand jobs they’ve done over the past 20 years. It is expensive but quite a few blogs give you a sneek peek.