Member Article

Glad enjoy a cuppa with Tesco

Glad have been appointed by Supermarket giant Tesco to design a number of contemporary home-ware products. The first of these products, a pair of typographic coffee and tea-themed mugs, have now been manufactured and are available on the shelves of larger Tesco stores across Britain.

The two mugs feature the messages ’a nice cup of T’ and ’wake up & smell the coffee’. Glad’s design team have made use of the negative space within the letterforms to bring out images of mugs, teaspoons and coffee beans.

David Burdon, Creative Director at Glad, says “The brief was to come up with an iconic, trend-leading piece, preferably utilising negative space. It was really nice to be given the opportunity to design something quite contemporary in its style for a retail client of this scale.”

Glad has a particular interest in the use of negative space within design. Burdon traces this interest back to his life drawing classes at art college, in which he and his fellow students were asked to draw the spaces around the figure, rather than following the usual practice of drawing the figure itself. Burdon sees this exercise as a pivotal moment; “This idea of using negative space and looking at things laterally, continued to hold my interest and became a major influence on my design work”. Burdon’s work has received recognition from the Roses Design Awards, Scottish Design Awards, Fresh Awards and the London Design Festival.

Mark Bond, Head of Design at Tesco has been working with Glad on the development of further home-ware products. “We initially made contact with Glad when one of our design managers noticed Burdon’s work and felt it was right for a range of contemporary kitchen products that we were planning at the time. We’ve found that David and the team at Glad bring great ideas to the table and are able to bring those ideas to life with craft and style”.

The tea and coffee mugs are now available at larger Tesco stores. Further products designed by Glad are in development with a view to having them hit the supermarket shelves for Spring/Summer 2013.

www.weareglad.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Burdon .