Sweetheart has since been acquired by Solo, which in turn was acquired by the Dart Container Corporation, adding layers of complexity to the search for the pattern’s origins.Ī few years back, users on Reddit started to crowdsource the question: who had designed this classic tableware pattern? A group of participants in the hunt took it upon themselves to write the company and ask, musing over the design in the midst of their message: “We can’t quite put our finger on what aspect of it is so visually pleasing to us.
#Paper cup design 90s series#
Originally, though, it was applied by the Sweetheart Cup Company to a series of plates, bowls and cups. Today, the very 1990s-style teal-and-purple Jazz design can be found on t-shirts, sandals, bumper stickers and other fan-made merchandise. In the realm of paper cups, there is a parallel icon - the dynamic “Jazz” pattern is also a classic, but its history and the artist behind it were largely a mystery until recently. I just liked the purple with it and everybody seemed pleased with that.Imagine a plastic cup and one particular red-wrapped variant will likely come to mind, designed in the 1970s by Robert Leo Hulseman, son of the Solo Cup Company’s founder. “I wanted another overlapping color that would work well together. “I just did turquoise, or teal, because that’s one of my favorite colors,” said Ekiss. One of the parameters for the contest was that the design could only be one or two colors because they were going to be run at a fast speed on the presses. “I think I probably just had some on hand at my desk and was just messing around and I liked what came out.” “I’ve still got the original at home,” she said. The original artwork was actually drawn with charcoal, Ekiss explained. She created three or four designs for the contest and “Jazz” is the one the corporate headquarters ended up choosing. “We had approximately 30 artists here in Springfield and we said, ‘Why can’t we submit some designs?’” “They hired several other outside firms to come up with the designs but didn’t like any of the outside stuff they were receiving,” she recalled.
In the first few years she was with the Sweetheart Cup Company, they held a contest to come up with a new design for the mass-produced cups. “I did a lot of designs but this one particular seems to have some staying power and now it’s got its own life online.”Įkiss worked at the Sweetheart Cup Company in Springfield, Missouri, from 1987 to 2002, before the company was bought by Solo and moved their art department to Baltimore. “My family and everybody just kind of grew up with the fact that I did it,” she explained of her masterful design. It took the serious sleuthing of one local Missouri reporter, Thomas Gounley of the Springfield News-Leader, to track Ekiss down after stumbling across a Reddit page hoping to locate the “graphic designer who made the ‘jazzy 90s’ image that appeared on millions of paper cups.” “I’m just still pretty stunned about the whole deal,” Ekiss, 50, told ABC News of her shocking new celebrity status online. Meet Gina Ekiss, the original artist of the masterful design who now lives a quiet life with her family in Aurora, Missouri. The creative genius behind the snazzy neon-colored logo, however, remained a mystery for the most part - until now. The retro design, appropriately called “Jazz,” has been immortalized on tons of fun merchandise from T-shirts to sneakers, bicycle helmets and nail art, to name just a few. But 23 years after the cups were introduced, we can appreciate this gnarly nostalgic design for what it is: pure throwback perfection.