Fresh From The Field — Kaffee Eis and Gellicious Gelato product packaging – By 45 Design Studio
For the month of March we are shining a special spotlight on Aotearoa women designers – from their work to their stories.
Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing the fresh and inspiring work of our Aotearoa Design Assembly community.
Moving away from a photographic solution and focusing instead on the product colours and a clean typographic layout, 45 Design Studio walk us through their recent work for Kafee Eis and Gellicious Gelato
Want to submit your own work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the FFTF form here.
The brief
What goes perfectly with a hot summer’s day in Wellington? – gelato and sorbet! We were so excited to see our packaging design for Kaffee Eis’s Gellicious Gelato finally hit the shelves we couldn’t resist the chance to show it off. It gave us the perfect excuse to dabble in a bit of traditional stop motion and share our work with Fresh from the Field.
So how did this journey of delicious gelato and sorbet design begin?
After featuring Kaffee Eis in our self project, Cuba Street – a cookbook, we were given the opportunity to design for Kaffee Eis. This meant sampling over 12 flavours of gelato and sorbet to build up a Pantone resource so that future design could reflect the sunny, pastel colours of gelato and sorbet. The best colour matching job ever! After designing three in-store pottles and various promotional materials, we were then tasked with designing packaging for Eis’s gelato/sorbet brand Gellicious Gelato. This meant designing a system that worked well on both 950ml and 180ml pottles and would be easily identifiable if viewed from above in supermarket freezers.
The Design Response
We love designing for Kaffee Eis, the fresh colours and happy nature of a cone of gelato instantly put you in a good mood – until you have to design on a curved pottle! For the instore pottles, our final design solution of variable width and coloured lines was a definite challenge to keep the lines feeling straight. A similar challenge was presented to us when designing the Gellicious Gelato packaging – how to use type and minimise its distortion on a curved surface. As first-timers designing with type on such a strongly curved container, we had to learn fast how to reverse engineer from flat plan concepts to curved finished art.
Our design response was to move away from a photographic solution to the brief, focusing instead on the product colours and a clean typographic layout. We created a system that was able to handle variable amounts of content, and still be scaleable across two very different-sized pottles. We used circular blocks of flat colour to keep the graphics wrapping around the form without creating edges. This graphic device also provided visual separation between blocks of information. A Pantone colour system of three colours per flavour enabled us to reflect the product inside but also to provide visual contrast for the type and circular forms.
The Design Team
Liane McGee (graphic design)
George Bulleid (motion graphics)
Andrew McGee (stop motion advisor!)
@45designstudio
@cuba_street_cookbook
The Client Team
Karl and Jo Tiefenbacher, Gellicious Gelato and Kaffee Eis
Client details
@kaffeeeis
https://kaffeeeis.co.nz
