Jamie Zirk: Art direction & storytelling

Fresh Handmade Catalog

I love working on long-form publications, and bonus points for a project being iterative and getting to go back and continue to play through multiple issues.

Lush's Fresh Handmade Cosmetics catalog was a project I got to art direct, design and run production on for several issues, and each issue was an opportunity to grow the experience.

New season, new issue

Hero spread for a summer issue

Lush's Fresh Handmade Cosmetics catalog (formerly known as the Lush Times) was the final iteration of a long-standing, beloved free publication produced by the brand to share its values, ethics, and extensive product range. Previously, the Times was perfect-bound and typically ran just shy of 200 pages in an 8 x 10" format, across four distinct languages/regions.

It served multiple functions:

• A regulatory compliance piece
• To add value for customers
• Unintentionally, it supported shop staff in training and selling

A large part of Lush's product range is "naked" (aka, packaging-free) which is great for the environment, but not-so-great when it comes to regulatory information. You know, the exciting things like ingredients and product weights that typical cosmetic packaging hides on the back.

I was the design lead in a small team tasked with reimagining the Lush Times to be primarily product focussed, retaining all products (packaged or not), regulatory information, and value to the customer, while drastically cutting down on paper usage.

By switching to a horizontal format, creating a flexible and playful grid, moving the product ingredients to a glossary in the back of the catalog, and weaving the brand values into the copy of the category hero pages, the redesigned Fresh Handmade Cosmetics catalog not only resulted in a 30% reduction in page count, but was also physically half the size.

In this form it ran for about two years, with a dozen issues published.