Cornish graphic design agency Venn Creative has won the coveted award for their brand identity for the Canadian cold pressed juice.
Working closely with another Cornish company, content studio Stranger Collective, Venn Creative created the brand identity, which included logo, packaging and e-commerce website, around a series of large numbers designed to communicate the fact that each juice forms part of a five-day cleanse.
The typographical treatment was inspired by a desire to create something distinct from the rest of the raw food market. “The design was inspired more by what we didn’t want to do, than what we did,” Venn co-founder Zander Grinfeld told coadg. “We had learnt about what was happening in Canada’s FMCG market and tried not to do that, so we didn’t want to go down the traditional ‘raw’ or ‘organic’ look and feel, we didn’t want it to be too hipster, we didn’t want it to be too fussy. We wanted it to stand out, but not be too challenging.”
The client brief was to create a brand that would launch their product into a new space. “We wanted people to be able to see the juice, so I knew from the start that the colour of the print against the colour of the juice was going to be important,” says Zander.
The five juices are intended to be drunk one per day across five consecutive days as part of a five-day cleanse, so this idea is at the heart of the branding. “Food and drink packaging is incredibly challenging. You need to stand out, be noticeable from a distance and instantly create familiarity, but you also want people to be intrigued enough to find out more about your product,” says Zander. “The numbers do a lot of that job. They’re familiar shapes, which makes them instantly recognisable, but they have meaning, which encourages the user to find out more – about cleanses, about the product range and about the benefits of cold-pressed juice.”
Further iconography and imagery on the website and packaging guides customers through their detox – paired with striking photography that communicates the freshness of the cold pressed, unpasteurised beverage. One tiny detail that also helps to do this is the degree sign before the brand name – which was a breakthrough moment in the design process.
“Inspiration is a funny thing,” says Zander. “The designer who says he doesn’t copy things from the world around him is lying – it’s impossible not to be influenced by what you see. What makes a great designer is someone who – however hard they try to replicate something they’ve seen somewhere else –can’t help but come up with something new in response to the brief. That said, every now and then you do get what does feel like a moment of inception. Putting a degrees symbol in front of the C to represent the fact its cold-pressed was a tiny thing, but at the time, it did feel like we’d just invented the wheel, or discovered DNA!”
Now that it’s out in the world – or in Canada at least – what are Zander’s hopes for the product? “I hope people think, ‘Whoa, look at that massive number, I have to drink that juice now!’ There are probably more steps to the process, but that’s the short version.”
