Second Draft

What a busy year! 2015 has been a blur in the studio with a real variety of exciting projects. With our own work we have been focussed on the 2016 calendar - something a little different! We are posting them out now to our clients and soon you will be able to buy one on our website. We brought you our pick of Design Classics - actually quite a tricky brief! There is so much good design out there, we selected those items that stood the test of time and are still being referenced in design today. If you sign up to our newsletter you can see which piece we feature each month. Here a few of our favourites from this year... Our 2015 calendar was all about time travel! For December we conclude with The Time Machine, H.G. Wells' marvellous creation. A book that has inspired countless future generations with stories that dart through time. Our idea came from the well loved movie Back to the Future Two, where Marty McFly travelled to the future (and the past)  to right some wr...

You may have seen our 2015 calendar circulating social media or in our latest newsletter. Every year at Pickle Design we like to put together a calendar and present it as a gift for our clients. Over the years this has taken the form of bookmarks, badges, concertina folds, colour wheels and illustrated trees. Last year we created a poster celebrating great 20th century chair design. This year, 2015, held some significance for fans of the movie Back to the Future 2 as this was when Marty Mcfly travelled to in their version of the future. This captured our imaginations so we started to think time travel. 2015 doesn't feel that futuristic (so far) but a few things from the movie have come into being. Take when Marty Mcfly (Micheal J Fox) sees Jaws 19, the reference to countless sequels and movies in 3d is pretty spot on. There is also hand held computers, hands free gaming and video conferencing.  So in the studio we decided to take the theme of time travel and create ...

The Molded Plastic Dowel-Leg Chair. View source .   Wow, this year is moving fast! Now we have embraced March and 2014 is looking to be a good year, we are working on some really interesting projects. The month of March on our very lovely Pickle Design calendar showcases a chair by husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames. The rather does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name it has, is Molded Plastic Dowel-Leg Chair. Despite having an ugly duckling name, this 1950s chair has become a design classic due its simple and beautiful design. Eames Chair Design. View source . The designers never saw their furniture as finished, constantly updating when new materials and techniques came available. Charles and Ray Eames saw their legacy as “getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least” - quite a mission statement! Their designs have stood the test of time and still look very contemporary in chic modern interiors. You can download March’s calendar f...

The Y Chair by Hans J. Wegner. Image found here . We find ourselves in February, and on the 2014 Pickle Design calendar we are showcasing the Y chair. Download a desktop version of the February calendar here . At Pickle we love looking at all areas of design for daily inspiration. We use Facebook , Pinterest , Twitter , Tumblr to drench ourselves in creativity, but there really is something quite special about chair design. Not only does a seat need to be comfortable (trust us, we sit in one all day!) but a well designed chair can make a statement about the designer themselves, the home owner, or society at large. Hans J. Wegner created this chair in 1950, basing the design on traditional Dutch paintings of merchants sitting in Ming chairs. Wegner was a perfectionist. Stylistically there wasn’t necessarily a common thread between his designs, it was more his ethos that shone through, he said "the good chair is a task one is never completely done with", it was "...

2014 is here! We like to start as we mean to go on, with good design, so we have a little present for you. You may have seen our new calendar showcasing classic chair design, well, we thought we would make each month available for you to download for free. Now you can have a sleek calendar for your computer desktop. January depicts the Tulip chair designed in the 1950s by Eero Saarinen. A version of this chair was used in the original Star Trek series but slightly altered. One of the Tulip chairs from Enterprise’s bridge once sold for $18,000! To download yours, visit our website here . Each month we will post a link so you can download the next one. Enjoy! Emma Julian.

We are very proud to unveil our 2014 calendar, an A2 poster celebrating great chair design. Every year we like to design a calendar for our clients - nothing standard of course - but a chance to show off the Pickle Design style, and hopefully create something our clients want to keep. There are always challenges we have to face, but it is quite fun trying to find a cost effective way to produce them, that doesn’t loose impact. Our 2014 calendar uses just two colours, red and blue, but layers them in opacities to create bold representations of iconic chair designs. The typography is clean and simple with a retro bent. Usually I draw my illustrations by hand and then scan them in, but for this particular project I had a very clear style in my mind, so I used Adobe Illustrator. I looked at these pieces of furniture as shapes, and made them up in shades and segments to build, hopefully, striking representations. The calendars are available from the Pickle Design website here , ...

This years calendar was an opportunity for us to pour our ideas into a project for ourselves and our clients. The design needed to appeal to our varied audience so we decided on the image of a tree, in keeping with some of our existing branding. The intention was to show the seasons of the year moving around one tree. The imagery ended up being fairly abstract, but there was enough detail to illustrate the idea. We used tidy typography alongside handwritten words to reflect our friendly, yet restrained style. The palette selected is a neutral one, but we picked out those all important Saturday and Sunday dates in a pillar box red. We then paired the calendar with a matching red envelope and sent them out into the wintry weather to our clients and interested businesses for the next year. Marie Lawley