JKR

I love these new designs for Chiquita banana stickers, designed to the dream brief “make bananas cool”. Twenty five cool characters in Chiquita’s distinctive yellow and blue style, and additional stickers carrying playful messages. But here’s the rub – the root of the idea was in using good/bad characters to dramatise the idea of not letting one’s banana go bad in the fruit bowl. “Be a good banana” goes the central message.

While not wanting to get all “No Logo” on the case of these charming designs, Chiquita takes plenty of flack suggesting that it is far from unassailably “good” (check out article). It can’t be easy to run a squeaky clean brand when the produce comes from Colombia, but allegations of paramilitary support and workers’ rights violations are numerous for the company. I stress the word alleged, but given the amount of smoke one questions if setting oneself up as a “good banana” is prudent.

Design work in the commercial sphere is always going to operate in a morally grey area, and unless one wants to turn away the vast majority of business then there are always going to be choices and moral compromises, be it over un-environmental substrates, animal testing, salt in food – whatever. In other words, the designer who chooses to cast the first stone is either self-deluded or ignorant. Nevertheless, the strategy informing this work does seem to be remarkably divorced from a cursory reading of the brand’s Wikipedia page.

If you want to skip the politics and just enjoy the fab work, there is a great feature on design related