2014 Pickle Calendar: Classic Chair Design

For our 2014 Pickle Calendar, we wanted to create something bold, graphic and unashamedly about design. At Pickle we have always found inspiration in all sorts of places: art, architecture, photography, illustration, product design and fashion. It all feeds into the work we make.

This year we wanted to celebrate the chair. With so many design classics, it was a challenge just to pick twelve.

Twelve chairs, one idea

A chair is such a familiar object, but designers have approached it in remarkably different ways. Our final selection brought together twelve designs with completely different forms, materials and personalities, from the sculptural furniture of Le Corbusier to Arne Jacobsen’s graceful Swan Chair and Frank Gehry’s wonderfully unconventional Wiggle Chair.

What interested us most was how instantly recognisable many of them remained when reduced to their essential shapes. The pedestal of Eero Saarinen’s Tulip Chair, the curves of the Swan Chair and the looping profile of the Wiggle Chair need surprisingly little information before you know exactly what you are looking at.

The original 2014 Pickle Calendar, photographed shortly after it was printed.

Drawing the design classics

We represented each of these iconic designs using a restricted palette of red and blue. Limiting the artwork to just two colours helped bring together chairs created decades apart and made from completely different materials, while giving the finished poster a bold, slightly retro character.

The overlapping colours and simplified shapes allowed us to suggest depth without losing the graphic quality of the illustrations. Part of the pleasure of the project was discovering just how far each chair could be simplified without losing what made it distinctive.

The finished calendar

The finished calendar was produced as an A2 wall poster, with one chair representing each month. With twelve illustrations, twelve sets of dates and the accompanying information all sharing a single sheet, it could easily have become crowded, so we kept the typography restrained and allowed plenty of white space around the artwork.

We also created individual desktop calendars for each month, giving each of the twelve chairs a little more room to take centre stage.

A new life for the illustrations

More than a decade later, we returned to the original chair artwork. Removing the calendar dates allowed the illustrations to stand together simply as a celebration of classic chair design, while keeping the red and blue palette that gave the original project its character.

Looking back at the project, it is easy to see why the subject stayed with us. Our fascination with classic design has continued to crop up in Pickle projects ever since.

We also wrote about the calendar and some of the inspiration behind it over on Design Debate in Take a Seat: Classic Chair Design and the 2014 Pickle Calendar.