Wales doesn’t have a rich design history. We’ve had famous poets, musicians and inventors but not many designers. Talented designers can be found all over Wales but I’ve struggled to find someone who has shaped the history of Welsh design or just design in general. I did find a lot of general history about Wales which I definitely spent too long looking into.
One story which I loved was that of a local brewery in Llanelli, South Wales, 1935. After hearing that a brewery in America had managed to design, produce and manufacture cans that could store and ship their beer, many welsh breweries raced to catch up. There was no canned beer in Europe at this point and the men on the front lines wanted a drink that wouldn’t go flat. The owners of Felinfoel brewery were tin industry experts and knew that if anyone had a chance to crack the case, it was them. They cam up with the idea of lining the inside of the cans with wax to keep the metallic taste of tin out of the beer. They also had to design the cans to go through their current bottling lines with ease. It’s clear that a lot of work went into solving the canned beer problem.
Designers are problem solvers and storytellers. Swansea born Dylan Thomas, Wales’s most famous poet, wrote about all things Welsh. The countryside, the people, the feeling. He told the story of the country and is globally recognised for it. Storyteller. Tenby born Robert Recorde, a mathematician and problem solver. Tired of repeating the same phrase after every equation, – is equal to -, he simply started using a set of parallel lines of the same length, “because no two things can be more equal”. The man literally invented the = sign. He had also adopted the use of the + sign for mainstream use. Problem Solver.
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