The One for Wood
Painting the Past UK is a British paint company known for its bio-based, VOC-free wood paints, with a strong focus on nostalgic, character-led colour collections.
Painting the Past
Industry
Home Improvement
My Jobs
Designer
Art Director
Tools
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Overview
Painting the Past makes paint-and-primer-in-one wood paint, formulated to be bio-based, VOC-free, and made in England — positioning itself against an industry not typically known for personality or storytelling.
They came to me with an AI-generated mock-up as creative direction, and I built the packaging exactly to those specifications. Once produced, the problems were obvious — hallucinated illustrations, disjointed 80s-inspired graphics with no real logic, and their core values repeated across four different spots on the pack.
Rather than starting over, I had a backup concept ready that pulled from the nostalgia and whimsy they'd originally wanted, leaning on Wes Anderson's typography and design sensibility to bring a distinct, storybook character to an otherwise unglamorous category.
The Results
The final identity replaced a chaotic, AI-generated first draft with a clean, intentional system — one flexible enough to scale across their full paint range and social presence, while staying true to the nostalgic tone the brand was built around. It's a case study in creative recovery: turning a misfired brief into a stronger, more considered outcome than the original direction would have produced.
