The August Newsletter – The Anglepoise Lamp

A favourite for every designer’s desk (we have two!), the Anglepoise is a design classic that rather literally looks down on other lamps.

Back in August 2015, we chose George Carwardine’s Anglepoise lamp as our latest Design Classic. It was already a familiar sight in the Pickle studio, and one of those pieces of design history that is so useful and so recognisable it is easy to take for granted.

The Anglepoise lamp

Automotive engineer George Carwardine developed a spring that could bend in different directions while holding its tension. Inspired by the movement of the human arm, the mechanism eventually found its perfect purpose and, in 1932, the Anglepoise lamp was born.

We also loved the stories it had gathered along the way. Anglepoise lamps were made for wartime aircraft, and decades later one was reportedly recovered from a Wellington bomber that had spent around 40 years submerged in mud – and the lamp still worked.

Perhaps what appealed to us most, though, was its personality. In the original newsletter Emma described the lamps as ‘peering over our shoulders to offer encouragement when deadlines demand late night working’. There really is something oddly friendly about an Anglepoise.

We’ve returned to it several times since. If you’d like to explore the story further, take a look at our illustrated history of the Anglepoise lamp.

Also in our August 2015 newsletter

There was plenty more going on at Pickle that month. We featured a responsive website we had designed for Cornish food company Samphire, some exhibition banner work for White Cloud Linen and Laundry, and our August calendar artwork inspired by Terry Gilliam’s wonderfully strange 12 Monkeys.

Responsive websites were still something worth explaining in 2015. The Samphire site had originally been designed for desktop, before we adapted it so the layout worked properly across tablets and phones too.

Our 2015 calendar had a time travel theme, which brought us to 12 Monkeys for August. We focussed on the circle of twelve monkeys that crops up throughout the film – a suitably strange image for a suitably strange Terry Gilliam film.

Read the original newsletter

You can read our original August 2015 newsletter here, complete with all its very 2015-era Pickle goings-on.

And if you’d like the current version to arrive in your inbox, you can sign up for the Pickle newsletter here.