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Chocolate Amatller Brand
The brand CHOCOLATE AMATLLER appears throughout its extensive history in a multitude of different forms. Unlike the current orthodoxy, the brand identity was limited to its name and was not necessarily linked to a unique visual representation. Each artist made their own brand logo, designing it according to their own creative style, whether it was meant for the packaging of a product, a poster or a calendar.
The option we adopted was extracted from a poster celebrating the brand’s centennial, work of the most famous Art Nouveau illustrator, Czech Alphonse Mucha. The decision to add "Barcelona 1797" as the brand subtitle reveals its origins and projects a unique, distinctive and very pertinent profile. On the one hand, it claims the little known role of Barcelona as the pioneer European city in the chocolate mechanization process, an event that happened just before AMATLLER was founded. On the other hand, the perception of the Barcelona brand reinforces and gives international projection to the obvious affinity of their values. CHOCOLATE AMATLLER like Casa Amatller, its owners’ famous Modernist building on Passeig de Gràcia, reflects their history and a genuine Barcelona character.
This execution is part of the global project CHOCOLATE AMATLLER.
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Baldo and Kimba, pet food brands
A redesign of the visual identity of the Baldo and Kimba brands dedicated to pet food and associated products, aimed at dogs and cats respectively.
The packaging redesign project also addressed the identity of the Baldo brand. The reproduction of specific calligraphy, with the fluidity of the handwriting, gives it a friendly and familiar feeling. The predominating structure on the packaging of the products - the blue circle including the rest of the text - contrasts in its formality with the reproduction of the trademark, which stands out despite its moderate size. A work carried out in parallel with the Kimba cat food brand.
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Balliu Brand
Brand updating maintaining its main traits, its distinguishing circle and its tall "ll", but improving the brand legibility through adjustments in typography, size and space between letters.
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Castey Brand
An update of the CASTEY brand, the Spanish leader in cast iron cookware. An inverse colour version was made in corporate yellow, offering superior legibility on black, which is the most frequent background in the brand’s communication materials.
The new brand baseline "Hi-Quality for Hi-Cooking" was included. The brand application manual was also developed to establish clear usage rules.
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Roura brand
Ceras Roura has been producing candles since 1912 and is the Spanish market leader. A constant feature of the sector and at an international level is the representation of the flame as a symbol associated with the brands. Roura was no exception (see images 2 and 3), although it was by no means an original historical element.
The style of the flame motif and the typography used so far in the brand clearly points to a time when everything that seemed modern and industrial was imposed on what was considered "old" as traditional or artisan traits. A change parallel to the one that the candles experienced when they became a massive product, present in supermarkets and department stores, having been a typical article in specialized shops before.
In the current situation, accelerated market competition requires brands to differentiate themselves if they are to maintain value. The most honest and effective differentiation is the one based on what you are, without giving up anything valuable that is your own. Unlike many competitors, Roura is a family business with more than 100 years of experience, with values that it maintains despite its important industrial dimension and that today, - a very important aspect - distinguishes it from a quality level in the market with standards that are often not very demanding. These reasons led us to take as a reference a brand used in the 1930s with a classic, clear and timeless typography. When choosing this simplicity, it was valued to achieve a good coexistence between the brand and the visual personality of each range or product, avoiding incompatibilities of style.
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GoldenBridge brand
As shown by the packaging productions, the breadth of the cereal ranges behind the GoldenBridge brand name reveals the great variety of consumers and reasons for consuming one product or another. This means that the design must give each option a different profile and that it is vital to highlight the descriptions and be able to recognise each product from a photographic still-life that is attractive and has impact.
The whole affects the visual prominence of the common brand to a greater or lesser degree. GoldenBridge’s prior visual identity was thus a striking red shape with the name and a white suspension bridge inside it (see image 3). There was no problem with rethinking the brand so that it would not clash with what was considered a priority - giving each range its own profile. For a confidence-inspiring and more discreet brand role, we chose a neutral and contemporary typography, dispensing with rootless symbolism. The only value to be considered was already incorporated into the brand - the international nature of the English name that refers to the foreign origin of this product category.
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La Granja Brand
The graphic identity of the La Granja brand had not changed since the founding of the firm 50 years previously. Apart from the fact that its look corresponded to the brands of the time, which still had its charm (see image 3), the most important thing was a long-term presence which was not worth interrupting with too radical a change.
In these cases, the guideline consists of retaining the essence and polishing the brushstrokes so that, by staying faithful to a style and a time, the brand’s validity does not suffer. In the original graphics there were visual imbalances that were corrected using a calligraphic lifting, while using extra elements that gave it a rather outmoded and little qualitative air. The result maintains the familiar and friendly character of the original, very suitable for a food product in this category, adding greater fluidity and balance in the writing.
Mallart, charcuterie artisans
It is not very common that the mere vision of a brand gives the public much and accurate information about it. This is what we decided as most appropriate in the case of the Mallart brand so as to raise its awareness and position it at the same time: a flow of information that is revealed to us from its graphic nature and the explicit contents it incorporates.
Mallart's goal is to expand its public knowledge through new selective retail outlets that appreciate its superior elaboration and flavor. Its condition as a high quality sausage maker is literally expressed in the graphic identity, which also exposes two important features to differentiate and give relevant value to its proposal. On the one hand, the good trade developed over more than 100 years, an aspect that is also visually reflected in a design style as artistic and qualitative as historical and traditional in the region of origin, the so-called Gran Penedès. On the other hand, it was precisely interesting to underline the origin in La Llacuna, a town whose specialization in making sausages is known in the area thanks to a particular microclimate, suitable for production and drying, and a centenary know-how in the mixing of meats and other ingredients according to distinctive own recipes.
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Mariebel Brand
The association with a traditional, gastronomic and unequivocally French product guided the radical change of what has the mission to express it in the first place, the Mariebel brand itself. (See image 2: previous design)
Underlining the origin was beneficial both for the French market itself and for the export markets, which recognise in France the cradle of most of this type of food base, along with the added value it brings. A discreet tricolour flag forming part of the brand identity makes it explicit.
Its more specific origin can also be identified, at least on the French domestic market. The region where the brand is located, La Vendée, is mentioned in the brand and one of its icons, a windmill, becomes the main motif of its identity. La Vendée has the largest number of historic windmills in France, attesting to the tradition of flour production, which is the basic ingredient in the products offered by the brand.
Both the illustration and the typographies used breathe the classic air that corresponds to the general style defined for the brand.
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Mas Pere Brand
One of the requirements in the briefing for redesigning the Mas Pere brand was to maintain the shield that appears above the name. As a symbol, the shield combines a reference to a certain origin - e.g. family or geographic - and an appeal to a current value from the past, tradition.
In the international markets in which the brand operates, the association between “cava product” and being a “traditional production in Catalonia” was possibly not as evident as in this our country. In this regard, the presence of the Catalan shield was informative, although as a concept it does not provide any exclusiveness within the scope of mostly Catalan cava brands.
To give the presence of the shield on the label more significance we proposed associating it with the Latin motto “Vitis Cataloniae” (see image 2). As well as making it easy to identify the shield’s origin, this gave rise to explaining, for an audience not familiar with the subject, another highly outstanding feature of the cava - that by preference it uses indigenous grape varieties. From the graphic viewpoint, the text of the legend completes the ensemble presided over by a shield now dignified and more credible, flanked by two griffins (a legendary creature half eagle half lion) with ornamentation that reflects a real historic representation.
For the name, we chose a typography whose modern simplicity draws from classical sources, in a balance that reconciles today’s validity with the symbolism of yesterday.
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Masdeu brand
The roots of the company as a family bakery in the Penedès region are evident in the old brand (see image 2). However, Masdeu's activities and profile as a company have changed a lot over the years and generations. First, by evolving towards the industrial field and specializing in biscuit bases in the foodservice sector. And more recently, it has taken on an international dimension with growing exports and the acquisition of the Mariebel brand and its facilities, specialised in producing puff pastry in Atlantic France. Today, Masdeu is the parent company of a group that operates worldwide, both in the foodservice circuit and in the retail channel under the Mariebel brand. For this reason Masdeu, as a foodservice brand, expresses itself at a less visually descriptive level and adopts the simplicity of a typography that corresponds to the close and friendly character of a brand within the world of food.
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Möller For Man Brand
Möller For Man is the brand that assembles the men’s cosmetics products, in parallel with the women’s line, under the brand name Anne Möller. The general revision of the design of its identity was based on extending and deepening the brand’s internationalisation and opting to capitalise on the impact of its presence on the most essential aspect, that of finding the greatest functional effectiveness in simplicity.
The previous visualisation of the brand was complex (see image 2). It maintained the explanatory base-line “Traitement Suisse” which was almost illegible and made the applications of the brand difficult. In addition, using French as the corporate language made the “Pour Homme” of the third line aimed at the male target audience less understandable in certain markets. In short, “Möller For Man” became the brand name, using a new, clear and timeless typography, with the technological touch that the consumer’s perception correctly attributes to the brand. A brand that is now less conventional and rigid, having abandoned the central positioning and having been arranged in two lines aligned to the left and with identical letter heights.
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Pastoret Brand
When the name and graphics of a brand transmit a large amount of information about it, it must be ensured that the profile that creates its perception in the mind of the consumer is completely coherent with the positioning objectives. Otherwise communicating a great deal is dysfunctional.
This was the situation that arose with the long brand name “El Pastoret de la Segarra” (see image 2) which appeared associated with a naïve illustration of the person in question, a little shepherd. Complex and clumsy at the same time, overall the brand name evoked perceptions that in no way fitted the reality of the brand and even less what it wanted to be in the future.
The most relevant connotations that the logo put over, such as freshness and naturalness, were expressed from the packaging, thus lightening the overload of communication from the brand name. Here the decision to opt for an exclusively typographic brand name was vital, discarding any illustration which, whether through what it expressed or due to the style in which it was done, could polarise tastes and lose validity over time.
The brand bane was shortened by routinely using: “Pastoret”. Two of the brand’s original credentials were used alongside it: “La Segarra”, the agricultural and livestock region where it comes from, and “Familia Pont” which relates to the company’s family and artisan roots, as well as the personal commitment of those in charge to always offer high quality.
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Chocolate Bars Mould
Having updated the brand and the design in the wrappers of Simón Coll chocolate bars, the task remained of personalising the bars themselves, which had been anonymous up to that point. In addition to this first aim, changing the mould of a chocolate bar involved adjusting the portion of consumption, although we had to maintain its overall dimensions and total weight.
This was therefore compensated according to the thicknesses and the reliefs in the chocolate, aspects which would be defined by the volumetric design of the bar. Being very easy to shape, the fine granulometry of our chocolate enabled very delicate lines to be reproduced in the mould. The new design of the bar identifies the surface of each portion with the brand, while the depth of the groove that surrounds it makes it easy to break off.
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Simón Coll Brand
Over 170 years the brand's visual identity had gone through all kinds of evolutions and regressions. The previous design consisted of the name in an italic typography with script capitals, which was not perfectly legible. The brand name was sometimes associated with an old illustration of a sailboat. This sailboat, in a rather coarse drawing and often just a sketch, was evocative of the Atlantic voyage raw materials like cocoa had to take in the 19th century.
The traditional and expert dimensions of the brand were values that could be enhanced in order to convey a higher perception of quality. But basically because they correspond to a bare fact to be capitalized on: the company continues to produce chocolate using to its own traditional methods, importing cocoa beans and roasting them in a unique way that gives its chocolate special flavour. The sailboat stood for this continuity. SIMÓN COLL had to appear, as was its right, as a genuine chocolate maker and this is expressed through the description "Xocolaters" in the brand's base line. The use of Catalan reveals the brand roots as well.
Changing the typography to capitals recovered the original style of the brand and greatly improved legibility. The cleaner and more important presence of the brand allowed us to add elements showing its values and to include a new version of the SIMÓN COLL sailboat illustration as a watermark.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
Via Avgvsta Brand
The reproduction of an authentic Roman coin was chosen from among different options as the symbol to be associated with the brand: an aureus with the effigy of Emperor Augustus, promoter of the VIA AVGVSTA in the 1st century BC and from whom it got its name.
The descriptive line "Gourmet Foods From Spain" describes the defined Brand Territory: a product range with different categories of high quality Spanish food products.
This execution is part of the global project VIA AVGVSTA.
http://www.via-avgvsta.es
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Viar Brand
The Viar brand has a traditional family profile, having existed for 70 years specialising in the production of all types of nougat with a great reputation for quality among those in the know. Despite this, in its latest stage the brand was represented with an appearance in line with the most conventional and undifferentiated code of food consumption. The name of the brand, in a standard italic typeface and with an ostentatious initial “V”, was situated circumscribed in the recurrent red oval shape, an archetype of impact and dynamism.
In the redesign, we chose to create a specific calligraphy for the brand which preserves and more intensely reflects the most relevant features of its profile, such as its artisan nature and its painstaking quality. The stationary applications have also been produced for the new corporate identity.