One January day in 1999 Shadric Toop and his architecture school colleague Alan Thompson decided to create a range of millennium gift products and to market them in time for the Christmas shopping season later that year. As Alan was running a print finishing business between his architecture degree and diploma, we decided to concentrate on something we could manufacture ourselves. The result was the ‘Sphere Millennium Diary’. Our goal was to shake up the stationery market with something truly different and beautiful – both graphically and 3-dimensionally. A diary was the obvious key product to work on (we also produced notebooks and address books). Time was our theme – we developed a spiralling graphic which depicts the dates of the year 2000 spiralling off into the plane of the page. This graphic was debossed into a heavy-weight recycled cover. The spiralling time theme was reinterpreted inside the diary, with the months and the days depicted as spinning wheels – each week-to-view page being a unique abstract composition. We also packaged the diary in several alternative ways. Alan came up with a beautiful combination of riveted polypropylene, brushed steel and magnetic strip – a range we called the ‘Trans’ range, due to the translucent quality of the spine. The product was on sale in some of the most prestigious stationery outlets in London by Christmas including The Conran Shop, Selfridges, The Design Museum Shop and Paperchase.
Millennium Stationery Design – The Sphere Diary
The Sphere Millennium Diary
Our Design
The Outcome
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