Interview about Wine Africa Limited Edition, winner of the A' Packaging Design Award 2020
The packaging design provides for four types of wine as red, blue, orange and yellow. The boxes has double count from both sides due to this possible to see bright colour of wine. The all bottles have own covered pattern as lines and spots on the surface depending on the animals that were used for each design. The eight imagery of various animals were used as illustratoons on the boxes. Thus, associations of the landscapes and fauna of Africa arise.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe idea was to create something unique emphasizing African flavor and directly related to African themes. Packages with animals of each species were chosen so that in a pair of graphic elements they would look like one whole.
I love eco-friendly materials and always try to use more of them in my designs. They always reflect a greater connection of interaction with nature than their more chemical counterparts, even if they look more spectacular! Moreover, the packaging design is directly related to the natural flora and ecosystem of Africa, which is the base of everything. It was logical to take natural design components as a basis!
Were carefully studied all the types of animal colors that I used in my Wine of Africa packaging and after that a graphic frame of lines was formed that personified this or that animal by transferring spots and graphic forms without using colors, so that the buyer could always intuitively understand which animal this or that graphic detail on the package belongs to. It's like a mind and logic game.
Africa is a stunning land with many-sided landscape colors, in every corner of which you can find something different from the neighboring lands of Africa. This and the riot of colors and the transmission of halftones and delightful pastel shades, everything mixed in their landscape variety. Red shades are the fiery African sunset, blue sky, yellow colors of shrouds and scorched grass and orange colors of many animals living there. And wines are a good addition to eco variety because their lands are very fertile and give a wonderful wine!
To do this, carefully selected animals that can interact well with each other graphically and be as one whole, but at the same time have their own personality and a well-read line of forms that allows you to recognize the figure of an animal without difficulty. The work was painstaking on these details and took a lot of time, but it seems that everything turned out well!
Creating a gloss in combination with a matte surface always looks great, because the gloss sets off the matte surface, but at the same time the matte effect does not come to the fore and allows the gloss to be an individual element that attracts eyes. The matte surface of the bottles here plays more of a role as a canvas on which paintings painted with glossy paint are depicted. Such an artistic plot.
I wanted to find more elegant forms for this design and the animals were chosen that possess them well while they should show a really complete variety of African flora through these 8 figures. A graceful giraffe and an interesting zebra seemed to be intertwined in one graphic element without losing their individuality, an elegant leopard and sophisticated cheetah, an unusual monkeys-red colobus and classic colobus, as well as an elegant chameleon-Namaqua and graceful Green Parson. These animals cover different lands of Africa well, for example chameleons live in Madagascar more, which are also part of this land!
The play of light through the cutout hole in the package always looks very impressive, it gives the effect of a glow like a gemstone and is achieved through the prism of glass, which will truly open in light or sunlight! This visual effect enhances the color contrast of the package and makes it lively, and not just static in 2d graphics. The 3D effect is achieved by light passing through the hole in the package.
The experience of a photographer always helps me a lot to build a contrasting composition between light and shadow, to look for the right light in the performance of graphic details and then when I make renders of my works, to see how well the design turns out on conceptual models before their real production. Studying photography as art, this experience gives an excellent base to see your designs in the volume of light and colors and treats it as art, and not just like some new idea of packaging.
I would like to work with African interested companies to further promote this idea as a new brand and create from this something more than only four packs of wine. It would be an interesting international experience.
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