The Advil and Vicks Vaporub repackaging is a silk screen project I started and completed in the Summer of 2019. Growing up as a Taiwanese-Canadian, some of my earliest memories revolve around my mother using various Chinese balms and medicines whenever I had a cold. I always remembered how wonderfully ornate and colourful the packaging for those medicines were, so different from the “western” medicine cabinet staples such as Advil, Tylenol, Vicks, etc. 

 

Prompted by this observation and my childhood memories, as well as my love for packaging ephemera, I decided to redesign the Advil and Vicks Vaporub packaging in the same fashion as those of Chinese ointments. To start, I did some research into the history of Chinese medicine packaging, trying to see if there was a reason behind the unanimous aesthetics. From there, I started drawing my initial ideas on paper, eventually bringing them into Photoshop to finalize their forms.