Message on a bottle: Minimalist mountain silhouettes bring Pietra dei Venti’s olive oil to life
17 Apr 2020 --- The rich flavors of Italian Pietra dei Venti’s olive oil are reflected in the brand’s newly designed labels. Illustrations of olive trees and leaves were substituted for elegant yet straightforward monochromatic landscape silhouettes of Italy’s Monti Alburni mountain region. Meanwhile, the use of premium rough printing paper combined with golden-inked details of the olive oil plantations helps this design to stand out on shelves, bringing the brand’s story straight to the consumer’s eye.
“A ‘minimalist’ [approach] is not a prior choice. It’s the result of the process. In our projects, we always try to tell a story that arouses emotion,” the project’s designer, Simonetta Pagliuca, of design agency nju:comunicazione, tells PackagingInsights.
Packaging is a key element of branding leveraged by companies to tell stories. “Storytelling: Winning with Words” was notably crowned as Innova Market Insights’ Top Trend for 2020 in F&B product development. Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on ingredient provenance and brand storytelling platforms in order to emphasize the taste and quality of their products.
Provenance platforms can communicate a whole range of messages to the consumer, including taste, processing methods, cultural and traditional backgrounds, as well as the more obvious geographical origin, notes Innova Market Insights.
“Olives, leaves and the sun are common elements of every olive grove. What makes the difference from the olive grove of Pietra dei Venti is the fact that it’s located just below these beautiful mountains. In our opinion, the landscape of Monti Alburni works well alone and it’s enough to tell its particular story,” Pagliucaexplains.
The high-quality paper and gold ink details help premiumize the olive oil brand. The mountain range is easily recognized by local consumers, says Pagliuca, considering the mountains’ sheer size and visibility from farther away regions. Moreover, those unfamiliar with the Monti Alburni region are still bound to appreciate the movement of the mountains across the label. “Those who have never seen it can’t recognize those specific mountains but they will understand their shape,” she notes.
The color choices of dark green, pink, deep purple and robin’s egg blue reflect the colors of the mountains in the different hours of the day: sunrise, sunset and nighttime. “During sunset, the mountains are almost pink and during the day, they are full green.” Moreover, the white background, substituting a clear blue sky, focuses the aesthetic eye’s attention on the mountain range and does not distract from its central role in the design.
The sole solar design element is a pictogram drawn “in the shape of the waves of fabric discs used for pressing of the olives,” a quiet nod to the olive oil culture behind the bottle.
Design details premiumize packaging
Two details that give the new design a 3D effect are the visual appearance of the gold ink lines running throughout the mountain range and the sensory bonus of using Tintoretto Gesso grease-proof paper. “The lines printed in gold foil give value to the label outlining the skyline, making it more recognizable. The gold recalls the color and the preciousness of the oil,” Pagliuca outlines.
“The paper is the Tintoretto Gesso grease-proof by Arconvert, a beautiful rough paper. Luckily, the printer helped us realize the packaging as we imagined it,” she affirms. Consumers continue to identify premium packaging not only through visual but increasingly also through texturized, sensory applications.
Nju:comunicazione specializes in the field of olive oil packaging, with its previous commissions hailing from Sabino Basso, Tenute Librandi and Olio Auro by Aurelio De Laurentiis, the latter two being winners of the Fedrigoni Top Application Award. “We enjoy working in the olive oil sector and we hope to keep working on new innovative projects,” Pagliuca concludes.
By Anni Schleicher
