Seeds I don’t need

Shelf Appeal goes to IKEA about once a year. It’s enough. Grab some cheap frames. Take some pictures of toys stacked high. Watch people eating meatballs and admire the strange green cakes.

I like to keep an eye on their packaging and graphics too. The food packaging is particularly tasty – simple, graphic and good.

This year was a bumper graphic / packaging year. They had these here seed packets on their shelves and they made me extremely happy. The £1.75 (for a pack of 3!) was out of my purse before I knew it.

These were drawn by Maja Sten, it says so on the packets. I seem to remember IKEA began as a named-designer-less zone, although I might be thinking of Muji. Maja’s website shows her to be a very good illustrator indeed, with a beautifully steady use of pen and a sense of pattern that seems to be in the blood of the Scandinavians.

These pretties have nothing of the beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian seed packaging about them. Which is why I like them so much, I think. Now, what to do with all those seeds…