Retro sweet wrappers
I tried looking at more unorthodox and playful places where stickers can be found, and came across an array of vintage sweet wrappers for bubblegum that come with a sticker in every pack. I really love the ridiculous designs of these wrappers, with fun typefaces and super maximalist colour schemes; they have a massive amount of character and tie into the nostalgic undertones of stickers themselves. For example, this Michael Jackson bubblegum wrapper is utterly ridiculous, yet amazing at the same time. I could definitely delve further into this approach of design, with intentionally ridiculous graphics and stupid catchphrases.
It could also be quite fun to take inspiration from these designs in their wacky and chaotic colour schemes; I could make my publication have an explosion of colour to create quite an all over the place design. In a sense this chaos fits into the idea of collecting stickers, as its a mash up of so many different visuals.
This wrapper also comes with 'skin stickers' which I think likely means fake tattoos; I could somehow introduce this into my publication and make a fake sticker tattoo flash?
I really love the primary colour scheme in this example, as it ties in super well to the undertones of playfulness and nostalgia. The type as well is really reminiscent of my childhood, so I could also take a closer look at retro typefaces to further expand on these themes.
This example really reminds me of comic book graphics, which has given me the idea to possibly tie comic books into the design process? I could for instance, create a comic book with corresponding stickers to create a more interactive experience. I feel like having a strong consumer interaction is super important for this brief, as its what defines publications and printed matter.
Somewhat controversial and definitely ridiculous, this candy cigarette design would be really interesting to take as inspiration for the actual layout and paper stock used in my publication. I was thinking that I could create a candy cigarette box design for the publication to be sold in, along with a sticker pack.
Jonny Trunks' 'Wrappers Delight'
“This is not the usual thing you see when 1970s packaging gets searched for – things like Spangles packs and old fonts for Mars Bars do not feature. This is much more extreme.”
Jonny Trunks book 'Wrappers Delight' looks at a multitude of retro sweet wrappers collected from the 70s. The book has over 500 pages of full colour images, with examples such as Planet of The Apes gum and The Beatles candy cigarettes (brilliant).
He started his collection after discovering old tat collected by John Townsend; he discovered items such as 80's phonecards and old club flyers, which inspired him to create a publication dedicated to the contents of Townsends collection. According to Trunk, the curation process of the book was incredibly heartwarming; Trunk learned that John (who died in 2015) collected things in Manchester right until his death, in the belief that he wanted to save things for the future to see.
The main thing to take from 'Wrappers Delight' is the drastic change in confectionary design; prior to modern packaging designs, all of the examples in the book are decorated elaborately with illustrations drawn by real people, including 'invented fonts, wacky pictures, fascinating graphic styles and brilliant techniques' says Jonny. Confectionary design nowadays has been massively simplified, with the role of illustrators vastly no longer needed. In his interview with Its Nice That, Jonny claims how he truly believes that design standards have declined over the years, designs back then were 'certainly more inventive and more crafted'.
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