Everything Old is New Again
Overview: A peek at how I rebuilt this vintage dairy branding from the 1950s with clean vector illustrations and typography.
I was contacted by the family of a decades-old dairy farm with the request to recreate their vintage brand materials into something new and fresh that they could use. I consider myself a regular Cool Hand Luke, so this gallon of milk was right up my alley.
The original work was never digital, so what they had here was a failure to communicate. Using their newspaper clippings and photos of various vintage advertisements, photos of the truck illustrations, glass bottle art, and other artifacts, I got busy pasteurizing… er, I mean vectorizing, this batch of milky goodness into a modern homogenized collection.
Newspaper clippings and samples from the early 1950’s.
Your local dairyman
This project was split into several pieces. The first step was working up the logo and any accompanying typography. Anything before 1950 was likely hand-drawn (especially signs and vehicles), so I got busy recreating the type and stylings as vectors within Illustrator. Very little of the original type had modern font equivalents.
Imagery
The next step was recreating any images or graphics. Since the original artwork was lost to time, everything needed to be redrawn by hand—the ribbons, laurels, candlestick phone, girl with the glass of milk—all of it. Illustrator’s image trace was only used on the Safety and Health script text for the initial pass then heavily refined by hand.
Coasters
The last part of the project used all the new vector art, remixed in multiple ways, to illustrate a series of new milk cap designs which will be used as coasters. Milk caps are a beautiful mix of typography and badge design with a very limited color palette.
Wrapping up
The farm itself is no longer in service, but the spirit lives on through these coasters, custom glassware, shirts, and other bespoke printables that will be shared among the family. This was a really fun project, and it warmed my heart to be part of historical preservation.
Thanks for reading, and grab the font for free in the store! 🥛
