Own Label by Sainsbury's Design Studio - in pictures

For anyone in their mid-30s and older, the nostalgia from this collection of vintage Sainsbury 's packaging is almost overpowering. Accompanying our mums on the weekly shop, we must have had burned into our memories the distinctive design of cornflakes boxes and sugar packets. For me, it's the crisps - clashing, Pop Art colours that slash across the packet like a lightning fork, designed, no doubt, to appeal to a small child.

Mundane, own-label supermarket products may seem an unexpected source of good graphic design - unlike, say, paperbacks or film posters - but Sainsbury 's in-house studio, which launched in 1963, took design very seriously. Its stripped down, geometric packaging from the 60s and 70s was ground-breaking. It featured simple, graphic, almost modernist representations of what was inside: a grid of spots representing cornflakes abstract circles with type on a diagonal slant on a box of assorted biscuits pared-down fruit segments in a two-dimensional glass on a can of bitter lemon silhouetted cats and dogs with jewel-like eyes on cans of pet food.

In the late 60s, the vogue for the arts and crafts movement led briefly to more free-flowing designs - seen on a packet of stretch tights from 1970 and with a loosely drawn sun on a 1976 box of cornflakes. But, generally, packaging was minimalist and restrained. The only thing that was sacrosanct was the company name. By the 70s, colour had grown bolder, and photography was even used.

Part of the joy in revisiting this extraordinary archive of specimen-like images is rediscovering what supermarkets stocked 40 years ago. Australian butter, broken eggs ("for immediate use") and, my favourite, simply "sauce" they all seem to have gone the way of packaging design that dared to be different.
Own Label: Sainsbury 's Design Studio, 1962-1977, by Jonny Trunk, is published later this month by Fuel at £16.95. The Sainsbury Archive is currently on long-term loan to the Museum of London Docklands. Visitors can view highlights from this collection in the Sainsbury Study Centre, where historical business records, including Sainsbury's design studio archive, are also available for research by appointment.

• This article was amended on 8 November 2011, adding the information about the Sainsbury's Archive at the Museum of London Docklands.

Sainsbury's own label

Sainsbury's own label