Research Object: Clipper Tea packaging

I’ve always really liked the brand design for Clipper tea ever since I saw an advert for it last year. Each kind of tea is represented by its own unique artwork and colour scheme, and is designed in a way that both looks good and easily grabs the viewer’s attention. The hand-drawn illustrations are also really vivid and attractive, and manage to blend in unexpectedly well with the strong typography – it reminds me of something out of a children’s storybook.

The success of the Clipper packaging is thanks to Big Fish, the design company behind the brand’s appearance, who according to their aim “only choose to work on projects that we have a personal belief in and that we would be consumers of ourselves”. They were asked to rebrand Clipper tea in 2008, and set up a blind tasting in order to see what message they could get out of the drink’s taste. Describing the brand as “natural, fair & delicious” Big Fish managed to create a design that reflected that statement. The artwork on the packaging was intended to stand out both at home and on the supermarket shelf, and in that respect I genuinely believe Clipper has achieved that goal.

Research Object: 'THE ISLAND: London Series' by Stephen Walter

I first discovered Stephen Walter’s complex series of drawings ‘The Island’ through its repeated use on the covers of Ben Aaronvitch’s ‘Rivers of London’ novels, and was immediately fascinated by how much detail was put into portraying every little part of the City in such a striking way. I wanted to know more about this piece, and discovered upon research that Walter’s drawings were not commissioned specifically for the book covers but in fact had been created a few years before, between the years of 2006 and 2008.

‘The Island’ is made up of 34 Archival Inkjet Prints consisting of the main picture of London as a whole, and its 33 separate boroughs. It was created using graphite on paper, and the full drawing is as long as 101x153cm. Stephen Walter – who lives and works in London – designed this map as a parody of historical ones from the past, aiming to look at the City’s secrets, undercurrents and vastness whilst also challenging the spectator’s initial views. According to his official website, ‘The Island’ “purposely innocent and acidic, trivial and serious… as much about the personality of its viewer than it is about of my own… it acts as a mirror.”