Author's note: while going through hard drives recently, I realised how much work I've done that I've never published or shown. To rectify that, I've decided to write a series of blog posts about that work. This is the first post of work "From the Archives".
My long-term collaborator and friend, Mike Wood, has put some of the most interesting projects across my desk. When we lived in London, Mike took over someone’s unused garden in south east London. Over many, many months of sometimes back-breaking work, he transformed it into a gorgeous, lush oasis with bamboo, poppies, vegetables, rhubarb, and a few small beehives in one corner.
These hives eventually produced a small amount of honey and Mike asked me to design some packaging for his small batch of jars. Given that this was going to be a very, very small run of labels, I chose to use round stickers printed by Moo for the labels. The size of the label – 1.5" diameter – acted as a constraint to inform the layout.
I put together a library of honey-related images – vintage tins, ads for honey from the past 70 years, labels, packaging – to serve as a basis for my sketches. After sketching a couple of pages of options, I settled on one execution and iterated it.
Left to right: earliest sketch, a refined iteration, the final product
After filling the jars, there was enough leftover for this tiny little one, about as tall as a Lego minifigure.