Chicken Parmo Crisps: A Design Exercise
Apr 21, 2026
A lad I play football with is launching a range of parmo-flavoured crisps. They’re incredible, by the way – but they also got me thinking about something that’s been rattling around in the back of my mind for years.
The parmo, Teesside’s finest export, seems to have acquired an unofficial visual identity somewhere along the way: yellow and blue. I’m not entirely sure where it started. My best guess is the takeaway box. Someone presumably needed to differentiate the parmo boxes from the pizza boxes, placed a specific order, and that was that. Then gradually, almost without anyone deciding it, every takeaway parmo in the region arrived in a similar box.
As the parmo’s reputation grew beyond Teesside, so did the merchandise. Birthday cards, socks, books, all leaning into the same yellow and blue. At some point it stopped being a coincidence and started being a brand. Nobody appointed a brand guardian. It just happened.
So before Easter, I thought I’d mock up a quick crisp packet design as a personal exercise. Staying strictly within the unofficial parmo palette, and seeing how far the idea could travel.
The result is above.
One thing worth making clear: this isn’t a final design, and I’m not angling for a packaging role. The manufacturer my mate uses handles production, design, and marketing as a package deal. This was purely a personal exercise — and if it happens to draw a bit of attention to what is genuinely a very good crisp, then all the better.
P.S. Any grammatical irregularities you may have noticed in the branding aren’t mine to fix, that’s the company name :).