Albert Heijn Pret Patat packaging

Packaging design for 500 grams of deep-frozen pre-fried French fries, from the visual archives of Stichting Albert Heijn Erfgoed. This foundation is dedicated to preserving the heritage of leading Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn, and to make it accessible to interested parties.

The bottom-heavy script is Charade. According to Canadian type designer and historian Rod McDonald, it was designed by Toronto-based artist Al Elliott (1922–1978) and released in the late 1960s or early 1970s by Headliners. It was copied by Castcraft as Gaston Agency and also adopted by Formatt for dry transfer lettering as Gaston, both before 1978. Brandywine Bold is another alias. Here it’s used in the Shadow style, with terminal swashes added to both words.

Stichting Albert Heijn Erfgoed dates this own-brand design to “approximately 1966”. Now is this an early use of Charade? Possible, but somehow I doubt that it goes back so far. I can imagine that it’s rather from the early 1970s, and the reason why it was dated ca. 1966 is simply because of the presence of the Albert Heijn logo: the now iconic ah monogram was designed by James Pilditch of Allied Industrial Designers (AID), London and introduced in 1966. So far, the earliest reliably dated in-use example for Charade in our – admittedly modest – collection is from 1973.