Tick Tock

When I looked for some rooibos tea at Sainsbury's, my eyes couldn't help but be drawn to the spectacular design of this package:

Thankfully, the price was right so I didn't feel that guilty about choosing my rooibos based on graphic design. It's so hard to say what the best part of the box is--the fabulously enormous letters that practically make you hear the sound of a clock as you read TICK TOCK, or the wonderfully retro cake with pink butter icing and a slice cut out just for you, or maybe even the satisfying typography of the tiny diamond in the "A" of TEA. In any case, this cheerful box sits on our exposed kitchen shelf along with the other rather austere boxes of Twinings, which proclaim "By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, tea and coffee merchants R. Twining & Co. Ltd. London" (Zzzzzzz), and the more pleasing Yorkshire Tea box, with its pastoral design that has graced these pages in the past. Tick Tock is a spectacular box amongst tea boxes. After a bit of nosing about, I found out that it was designed by Pentagram Design, and when I started to look through their range of work, I began to realise that this isn't the first time I've encountered their design, whether in exhibit design (Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibit), book design (the 2002 Whitney Biennial catalogue), branding (Heal's, Whitney Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Star Alliance airlines, Pantone), logo design (Penguin books), packaging ("Tesco Finest" range of foods, Tiffany's, Godiva), print (Dean & Deluca catalogues), signage (Toronto's Pearson International Airport), or magazine design (The New York Times Magazine, I.D., and Metropolis). An additional aspect of the Tick Tock packaging that got me thinking is its claim that it comes "from the founders of rooibos tea," which the side of the box explains was Benjamin Ginsberg, in 1903. First there's the obvious colonial bias, since the original inhabitants of southern Africa, the Khoisan, consumed rooibos for centuries before it was thus "founded." Even its colonial founding by Ginsberg is questionable, since a Swedish botanist noted the popularity of rooibos amongst South Africans in 1772. However, Ginsberg seems to be the first person to have widely cultivated and distributed rooibos to a worldwide market, so I suppose it is in that sense that the company (currently run by Ginsberg's grandson) can dubiously claim to be "founders." All this rambling about design and politics aside, I should also mention that Tick Tock makes a nice cuppa!