I did, the sticky ones for the IKEA glass bowls. Instead of using plastic Tupperware, you can now use environmentally sane glass containers with Bamboo lids. I designed the labels.
It is a tough one. You can appreciate how much information is to be placed on a really really tiny space. Most shoppers won’t realise the beauty of the tininess combined with the informative depth of the label. Many sleepless nights and extremely intense discussions between the IKEA folks, the glass bowl product designer and myself of how much information we really could place on such a tiny space. It took months. And yes, it is tiny, isn’t it? I am always fascinated how tiny it is, yet how informative! It tells you all you need to know.
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Look at the first striking wording. IKEA 365+.
It is a landmark sign, a dig into where you want to be. Bam! Here we are. 365+. It is not only for the year, it is far beyond (hence the plus). I gave it an easy spin just bolding up the font without going overboard. One doesn’t need to go crazy, the size of the letters will dictate where the eyes initially wander.
Then next to note, to be sure we are speaking about the same object, a neat little bowl icon in the right shape is shown and the quantity is established: 1x. You only get one bowl, not two or three, no, it is really only one. Important as retail law says whatever you offer on display you have to honour selling to the consumer.
And for all the people out there not familiar with basic physics: The bowl is dish washer safe, can be put into the oven and the microwave (I once had a flatmate putting a metal object into our microwave, it wasn’t pretty to say the least), and the freezer is equally a good place for the bowl.
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An important measurement to be noted is the 600ml. You will only notice this later as it’s strategically placed early on the descriptive text yet takes a step back due to its smaller font size to give priority to more anti-self-harming information (see microwave comment earlier). But once your perception buds are free to notice anything else than safety notes, you are enjoying other vital information. So, yes, you can fill that sweet baby up to quite a bit of pasta sauce. Not that you would have to cook that one up, maybe your partner, friend or flatmate is a dedicated chef so you are sorted and this information is obsolete. It is good to know though, isn’t it?
Then we are telling you all out there on the hunt for a storage container: It is only one thing you are purchasing, 1x it is. Hence, the label invalidates any other assumptions.
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Labels are amazing, aren’t they? They are the little unsung helpers vital to navigating our daily life challenges. And we hardly notice them or give them credit for their problem-solving skills!
So, where did labels come from?
When did we start to need them?
And who invented them?
Fair questions! Allow me to shed some light on those mysteries.
ANCIENT ROOTS
Labels originated thousands of years ago.
At ca. 3300 BCE, labels were evolving from ancient Sumerian clay roll seals.
The Sumerians emerged in Mesopotamia (which is modern-day Iraq) and are hailed as the world’s first true civilisation. The Sumerians built great walled city states like Ur and Uruk, the home of King Gilgamesh whose legendary quests were written down in the oldest surviving tale called “The Epic of Gilgamesh”. The Sumerians are also credited with inventing the wheel, early legal systems, and the first written language. Wow!
If you are asking yourself what clay roll seals exactly are, let me explain. A clay roll is a mechanism where you create a cylinder shape, most probably out of stone or wood. On this sturdy material, you engrave (you needed quite some skill to do that) your message or picture. Always remembering that you had to do it the other way round, meaning if you wanted to have an elevated shape you needed to carve into the printing stone. An indirect kind of thing to leave your mark!
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We are though more interested in the obvious everyday purpose of labels like identifying ownership, price and contents of the things you preserved, traded or handled. In those situations, it most probably was just scratched into the clay, a simple and potentially permanent engraving on pots and vessels.
Of course! You would want to know what is in the container from which you are about to pour into your master’s food or you would use when serving your family. Or just to make sure you can differentiate between the goat milk from June 23 and the one from July 7. It might have cost you your life, poisoning your mistress. Dates matter.
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Ancient Egypt advanced matters around 3000 BCE by creating the first pendant labels made of ivory, bone or wood. Those small tags were tied with string around the necks of wine jars. Archaeologists have found ivory tags in royal tombs detailing the year the wine was produced, the vineyard it came from and the name of the chief winemaker. Essentially, the world’s first wine labels.
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In ancient China 200 BCE, during the Qin and Han Dynasties, silk and paper were invented, and early merchants used slips of bamboo or stamped silk tags to label bundles of trade goods traveling along early trade routes. All to ensure their prized good reached the correct destination.
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The Greeks and Romans following in the footsteps of those ancient civilisations added their own spin. They started to deploy small tags attached to clay jars or other containers. Those tags were mostly used to mark wine which was a highly valued commodity for Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks and Romans alike. Booze, it seems, always had a grand standing.
Yet, one great thing had happened: The innovation of detaching the purpose of a container by not engraving it on its surface but rather giving it a flexible nature by adding a descriptive marker granted the reusability of the container. Magic idea!
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For coming centuries, Europe’s label business lost a bit of its promising momentum due to inconceivable other stuff civilisation had to turn its destructive forces towards (like the Middle Ages).
So, for almost thousand years, nothing really happened to advance the idea of labels in the Western World. Having said that, this might have been a different picture for the rest of the world. Yet, I don’t live there and I only rely on sources representing the Western World. I am biased.
THE GLUE AND PAPER LABELS
The transition toward modern labels began when paper met printing technology.
In the 15th century German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg laid the foundation stone for the modern development of labels.
With his invention of “letterpress printing”, Gutenberg changed one important thing compared to his peers before him: So far, European printers had used hand-carved wooden blocks to print whole pages which was a slow process, and the wood would quickly degrade. Gutenberg instead used his background in metallurgy and created custom moulds letting him create individual metal letters. He locked them into a printing frame and then simply reassembled his metal “stamps” for another project. Modern book printing was born!
It still took another 250 years until labels got professionalised. Until then, the oldest printed copies that are known date back to around 1700 and were very rudimentary. Damp glue was applied to the place where the label was to be placed, and the paper was then pressed firmly onto the glue, serving to identify medicine bottle or jars.
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Another milestone of label usage is yet again accredited to the good stuff aka wine.
More elaborate labels with a design approach came up when wine bottles made out of glass came into usage and fashion. The artistic design of labels was based on the invention of the lithographic printing process, which was developed at the end of the 18th century. Lithographic printing process, what?
Needing a cheap way to self-publish his own plays, German playwright and actor Alois Senefelder couldn’t afford to have his work printed by expensive letterpress printing. By accident, he discovered in 1796 that if he wrote or drew on limestone using a greasy crayon and rolled on ink, the greasy areas repelled the water and held the ink, which could then be printed onto paper. The universal principle of oil repelling water was how after all an affordable printing technique was born!
This is distinct from Gutenberg’s letterpress printing as suddenly printing wasn’t about expensive metal mould letters any more. It rather allowed artistic expression by simply drawing with greasy ink. It was a cheaper way of multiplying one’s work. It was an accidental invention transforming the art of mass-reproduction.
If you are familiar with Berlin, you’ll know the “Senefelderplatz” tube station. That is named after exactly this accidental print maker dude!
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And with the “Lithography Revolution” and the invention of multi-colour printing from the early 19th century, labels were no longer just a source of information. They were used for advertisement. American fruit orchard owners in places like California began printing bright eye-catching labels. They used natural gum or paste to stick these colourful labels onto wooden crates of oranges and vegetables to stand out from competitors at crowded markets.
Design turned labels into inexpensive advertising media that could be produced in large quantities. Wine labels are a fabulous example. They changed from a pure description of the contents to a kind of quality guarantee for the wine. Guilty as charged here by the way! I still buy wine bottles by their label. Thoughtful design, I buy. Not so interesting design, I buy not.
THE STICKY LABELS
And finally, they arrived! The sticky labels, the ones we are so used to as modern folks.
The ones who define all the produce you ever bought. The sticky labels you can peel off easily, and then there are the ones you cannot. You are furious because you thought the glass container would make a perfect little vessel for your own use. Just depends on the glue they used. I hear eucalyptus oil or nail polish remover is the answer to all glue removal projects.
Yet, hold on here. The first sticky labels were different from today’s and were invented by British social reformer Rowland Hill in 1840. Sending a letter at the time was incredibly expensive and costs were paid by the recipient based on distance and how many pages the letter contained. The system was unfair and ludicrous. Having only the modernisation of the global postal system in mind, Hill drove to invent the postage stamp one could lick to apply to one’s letter. Senders would buy an adhesive stamp, such as the famous Penny Black, and paste it to the top-right corner of the letter.
And hurray, whatever Hill intended in the first place, he introduced the concept of “lick-and-stick” pre-applied gum, removing the need for external pots of glue. The sticky label concept was born!
THE SELF-ADHESIVE LABELS
Things didn’t stop there though. An American entrepreneur called Richard Stanton Avery took things to the next level. In 1935 during the global economic crisis, Avery developed the first self-adhesive labels. The original brand name “Kum-Kleen” stressed the product’s primary selling point: The self-adhesive labels could be cleanly removed from a product (like fragile antiques or gift items) without leaving any sticky residue or marks.
Avery borrowed money from his fiancée to pull this business off the ground. I didn’t have the research capacity to further drill into this woman’s influence to establish his business. So, I just assume there was, and hence we bow here to those clever investment ideas from this unmentioned, unresearched woman. My apologies to her.
The flourishing business was renamed “Avery Adhesives” in 1937. In 1990, the company merged with Dennison Manufacturing to officially become “Avery Dennison”. Having said that, Avery’s invention was influenced by the first adhesive plasters, which were patented by the German company Beiersdorf in 1882. This was the first time a material had been successfully bonded with an adhesive that could be easily removed from surfaces. Who knew?
ARE LABELS TIMELESS?
Labels in different shapes and forms have been around for thousands of years and there seems no end in sight to their use. Labels have established themselves in countless areas, because hardly any sector of industrial production, trade and services can do without them.
In the not-so-distant future, we will adapt their appearance yet again.
With AI conquering the scene, I believe we might get used to “individual digital labelling”. Meaning the description and price of a product could be advertised, presented and sold at your personal value point. It could happen via individual holographic consumer screens or maybe via responsive scanning by the consumer.
Universal labels, I think will soon become obsolete. Hence, I invite you to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of old-fashioned label design as long as those sticky, informative, by times annoying and often cleverly designed labels are around!
Note to readers: The author didn’t design the IKEA labels described in this essay. The author was only inspired by the imaginativeness and creativity of the label designer when buying a glass container with a bamboo lid at IKEA Wembley. The author can only state that she applauds the bang-on and highly informative label design.
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