Grand Stuff: Taking a look at classic Irish label art through the decades
Niall McCormack put his book together during lockdown, using many items from his own collection.
What began as a hobby became something more serious for Niall McCormack when lockdown hit.
The Dublin-based illustrator and designer began collecting labels about 10 years ago as a sideline to another passion of his.
“Before that I was collecting Irish books for their covers, I had an interest in Irish book covers from the first 50 years or so of the State," says McCormack.
"A lot of my own work is designing books and book covers. They were piling up and I was a bit swamped by them and the research.
"I came across some labels and I was amazed at the quality and what was out there.
"I started putting the book together around the start of lockdown so I had a bit of time and I could just go through the stuff.”
The result of McCormack’s passion is the book , a beautifully presented collection of more than 600 examples of Irish label art from the 1890s up to the 1990s.
The book has a foreword by the Dublin-based graphic designer Annie Atkins, renowned for her work with film director Wes Anderson. She writes about how the collection reflects an element of Irish visual art that has been overlooked.
“The acid-bright colours of Egan’s Lemon Crush and the reverse-arched block lettering on a box of Vesta matches are every bit as Irish as any mossy-green Gaelic-lettered postage stamp design,” she writes.
McCormack says he wanted to get people to think about design in Ireland in the early 20th century and how it was more vibrant, diverse and sophisticated than many might imagine.
“In Ireland, sometimes the visual is taken for granted, it is not held in the same esteem as our literary or musical culture, or crafts, all of which we are world-class at. " he says.
"It is very hard to compete with that sort of reputation. The visual arts in Ireland, there is some amazing stuff out there and there always has been."
McCormack says that when people think of Irish design, particularly in that period, it tends to be Irish-American graphic design, a lot of shamrocks, shillelaghs, leprechauns, selling the idea of the old country to an Irish American audience.
"I was trying to show that what we were producing a lot of the time was quite a nuanced visual idea of ourselves. I wanted to get away from this idea of what you might consider an ‘Oirish’ visual language that a lot of us understand and know but it isn’t really true to what was going on.”
The book features an array of stout bottle labels — from a time when publicans bottled their own black stuff — as well as a gloriously colourful selection of labels from soft drinks, many of which were only available in certain counties.
McCormack says there was a variety that disappeared in the 1970s and ’80s as local companies closed or were swallowed up by conglomerates.
“I loved the regional variation in the labels, which there was much more of back then. There is a few things from the early ’90s in the book but really it peters out in the ’70s, that is because the print technology changes and the labels get less interesting to my eye, also that is the point where a lot of the companies are amalgamated, these local soft drink/mineral water companies, Coca Cola buy them up, and the small breweries are bought up by Guinness.”
Designers have tapped into vintage products in the last few decades as the appetite for retro design has increased.
However, McCormack says the labels in the book demonstrate how an authentic connection is important to such branding.
“As Annie Atkins touches on in her foreword, if you’re going to reference something from the past, it works best if you do your homework and base it on something real.
"You see a lot of retro-style design — I’m guilty of it myself — but it’s a pastiche, it’s nearly like a wallpaper or pattern you have thrown over it, rather than having a real engagement with what the product is or what the history of it might be.
"But when you see it well done, it is a really powerful form of branding.”
According to McCormack, the book reflects a time and place which is, in some ways, enjoying a resurgence, with a reorientation towards local business and industry.
“In a way, for example in craft brewing, we are back in a space where there is an awful lot more activity. The book brings us back to a world where you just saw whatever products the local shop stocked or whatever was advertised in the local paper.
"That is popping back up in interesting ways because people realise the local is important, your own story is really important.”
- Grand Stuff: Label Art from Ireland by Niall McCormack, is available via www.hitonebooks.ie
