We’ve actually been banging on about the Anglepoise for quite a while. Back in 2015 we chose it as one of our Design Classics, and ten years later it turned up again as the July illustration in our 2025 Design Classics calendar. Some designs really do refuse to go away – quite rightly in this case.

A very clever spring

Automotive engineer George Carwardine developed a spring mechanism that could move freely while holding its position, rather like a human arm. Teaming up with spring makers Herbert Terry & Sons, he first marketed the idea to industry before the public rather enthusiastically claimed it for themselves. The Anglepoise lamp was born in 1932.

It is one of those pieces of design that has become so familiar it is easy to stop noticing how clever it is. We have two in the studio ourselves, quietly peering over our shoulders and pointing light exactly where it is needed.

A design classic with some curious stories

The Anglepoise has gathered some brilliant stories over the years. In 1948 the BBC’s Head of Variety apparently had the lamps banned from BBC offices, fearing that their low light might encourage ‘degenerate programme making’. Thankfully that particular design critique didn’t last.

There have been giant versions too. The Roald Dahl Museum commissioned one based on the writer’s favourite lamp, while sculptor David Mach created The Giant Hand Sculpture using 360 black Anglepoise lamps.

Perhaps my favourite tale involves a Wellington bomber recovered from the mud during a search for the Loch Ness Monster. After around 40 years underwater, its Anglepoise lamp was apparently still working. Built to last indeed.

Still evolving

The original Anglepoise was George Carwardine’s creation, but its design story didn’t stop there. Decades later Kenneth Grange became Design Director at Anglepoise and developed new interpretations including the Type 75. We’ve recently been looking at Kenneth Grange and his extraordinary contribution to British design.

And if the lamp seems oddly human, you’re not alone. It inevitably brings Pixar’s Luxo Jr. to mind, although that animated lamp was actually based on a Luxo L-1 rather than an Anglepoise. Either way, there is something friendly about a lamp that bends over your desk as though it is taking an interest in what you’re doing.

Not bad for a clever arrangement of springs dreamed up more than 90 years ago.

If you’d like to know why we keep coming back to it, take a look at our illustrated history of the Anglepoise lamp, from George Carwardine’s clever spring mechanism to some rather unexpected appearances in British culture.

How does an everlasting pencil work?

Unlike a traditional wooden pencil, the Everlasting All-Metal Pencil has an aluminium body and a special alloy core containing graphite. As you write or draw, friction leaves tiny particles of graphite and alloy on the paper, creating a familiar pencil-like mark.

The clever part is how slowly the metal tip wears down. Rather than constantly sharpening away the casing and graphite, the tip is designed to keep going for a remarkably long time.

More stylus than HB

Visually it has more in common with a stylus than the typical stripy HB. The minimal aluminium body has a matt finish and a satisfying weight, making it feel more like a carefully designed object than an everyday disposable pencil.

The marks can still be erased like ordinary pencil and, according to the designers, are less prone to smudging. It is a lovely example of taking something incredibly familiar and asking whether it could work just a little better.

A familiar tool, rethought

For all our clever technology, there is still something very satisfying about sketching with a pencil, jotting notes in a margin or working something out on paper. I like that this design does not try to replace that experience; it simply rethinks the object itself.

A pencil that may last for years, never needs sharpening and still behaves much like the thing we have been using all our lives? Nicely done.

Originally found at Yanko Design.

Ïto refers to his design philosophy as ‘simplexity’ – making complex design feel simple – and it suits this car rather perfectly.

Simplexity on four wheels

There is a definite connection with the original R17, but everything feels cleaner, sharper and a little more cinematic. It’s sleek and substantial. Definitely getting movie vibes! The yellow lights especially give it an almost Blade Runner feel.

It was a team effort with Renault’s design team, and that shows. Nothing feels as though it has been added simply because it can be; there is a lovely restraint to the whole thing.

Inside the Renault R17: more lounge than car

The R17 interior takes a softer turn. The intention was to create something more lounge-like than your standard car, which I really like. It makes a lovely contrast with the crisp exterior and gives the whole thing a more relaxed, almost domestic feel.

A happy shark

One detail I particularly like is Ïto’s reaction to the original Renault 17. When he first looked at the car he saw something shark-like in its shape, and that idea stayed with him during the design process.

A happy shark, mind you.

Proportion was important too. The team had to accommodate the extra size and weight of the electric car while keeping the balance right and, crucially, without losing the personality of the original.

That is perhaps where this works best. It doesn’t look as though somebody has simply taken an old car and made it futuristic. It still feels like an R17.

These design collaborations are partly about exploring new possibilities for future cars, but I mostly love the amount of consideration that goes into something like this. It manages to be thoughtful without losing its sense of fun.

Form, function, fun.

Originally found at Designboom. Images by Lionel Koretzky and Renault, shared from the original article.

Anglepoise is one design name we’ve returned to more than once at Pickle. The original lamp was George Carwardine’s invention, but Grange later became an important part of its story, taking that familiar form forward for a new generation. His Type 75 is a lovely example – unmistakably Anglepoise, but cleaner and more modernist. We explored the story of the Anglepoise lamp in this illustrated infographic.

Design hiding in plain sight

What I find fascinating is just how familiar so much of his work is. You could easily have travelled on, cooked with, written with or photographed something Grange helped to design without ever knowing his name.

His career spanned more than 60 years and reached far beyond Britain, including typewriter design in Japan. But it is perhaps his mark on everyday British design that feels most familiar, from London taxis to red Post Office postboxes.

There is something rather lovely about that. These weren’t objects designed simply to sit in a gallery and be admired. Trains, cameras, food mixers, lamps and pens are things people actually use. Good design quietly becomes part of everyday life.

Form, function and a little playfulness

Reading the various tributes written about him, Grange comes across as a warm fellow with an air of humility about him. Known for his playful take on Modernism, he seems to have been motivated less by putting his own stamp on everything and more by the desire to make things better.

I think that probably explains why his work has lasted so well. There is personality there, but it never gets in the way of what the object is actually for. Form and function working together – with enough character to stop things becoming dull.

An admirable quality to be sure.

“No one and nothing is perfect – Improvement is the only responsible approach one can take in design as in life.”

(Images: Above; Kenneth Grange at home in 2014, next to one of his hugely successful Anglepoise lamp designs. Photograph: Joel Redman via The Guardian. Title image; combination of Grange’s works, images from Anglepoise.)

My initial encounter was with her laminated solar panels that create a sundial. Planted at a most majestic site, right in front of Egypt’s pyramids. The piece, called RA, was created for the 2023 Forever Is Now exhibition at Giza. Standing more than four metres high, it is made from laminated solar glass, creating a changing pattern of coloured light as the sun moves and storing solar energy so that it can continue to illuminate after dark. She works on a diverse range of projects, collaborating with the likes of IKEA, Céline, Stella McCartney and Renault.

It’s not all shiny, hard surfaces. Marcelis’ Boa Pouf is a seamless doughnut, softening those harder materials and forms. Her rugs are like tactile brush strokes, you just can’t help but caress. It is her lighting, though, that really stands out, perfectly comfortable in the world of fine art or illuminating the home.

There’s more to see too. A major exhibition of Marcelis’s work, Light and Color, opens at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich on 30th October 2026 and runs until 4th April 2027, bringing together her explorations of light, colour, reflection and material.

If you enjoy this kind of material-led design, you might also like our look at Michael Thonet’s Café Daum coat stand, where a very different material and manufacturing process became part of the design itself.

Emma first came across Sabine Marcelis through this article at Eclectic Trends.

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.

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