MATCHBOX LABELS from communist Czechoslovakia and Russia from the 50’s to the 80’s are fine examples of what you can do with design limitations!

I was first introduced to these little marvels at a weekly market at Gloucester Green, in central Oxford England. I found a shoebox filled with them at a stall, and spent a couple of hours looking through them all, one gorgeous label after another... and this is where my collection began.  I’ve collected thousands as they are dirt cheap (a now passed phase), and I dont really know what to do with them, but I know they must have an effect on my art.

They were made with cheap materials, and part of the draw to them is their disposableness, they were almost an afterthought, resting in the shadows,  just out of the direct line of people’s eyesite... “just give me the match, I need a smoke!” They were not even asking for attention, those humble things! The content was anything from selling products, to more state controlled messaging such as the promotion of public initiatives, health and safey measures, personal hygene, social progress, road safety, pollution. Generally communist ideals, state and civic pride, and often national optimism, etcetera.

But it’s the ability of the unknown designers to communicate beyond language barriers, to say so much with such a limited canvas, such little space, using at most, a few colors. The minimalist compositions are lovely, the shapes simplified, the colors sparse, making the use of negative space a must. I think this concept can relate to minimalist abstract art, where there is something universal about the simple shapes and colors that get right to the heart of something, an idea, or a feeling. The English painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) said about abstract art; 

“There is no need to concentrate, it is a part of living… it is a universal language.”