This photo essay of vintage cheese packaging originates in England, circa 1957. I love the bright colours and hand rendered illustrations and typography.

I feel overwhelmed by the urge to design cheese packaging now. Is cheese the new chocolate for me?

“It was there and then that a colorful package of cheese inspired one person (unknown) to start a collection of dairy labels, neatly organized in a scrapbook. His or her now-vintage collection — found orphaned on eBay — is a virtual journal of cheese branding in the mid-20th century.

Reproduced here, these graphic labels look just as the originals would have if you could step back in time, back to a day when bright, hand-rendered package art was a novelty and innocence wasn’t, and long before a blitz of color-soaked multimedia outlets emerged all around us. Once upon this time, artists illustrated a label to tell a story, evoke a feeling, with a single bright image. For many people such labels were the only artwork they saw from week to week.”

Via: The Design Observer Group