KOLMINE CHOCOLATES | PACKAGING DESIGN | BRANDING
Kolmine is a chocolate brand concept that makes authentic, handmade single origin chocolates. Their cocoa is sourced from the best quality cocoa producing countries like Africa, Ecuador, Peru, and Madagascar. They work with the local people and farmers thus generating employment in the region.
The brand aims to offer rich quality chocolates along with a glimpse of the culture of its country of origin, its people, and its traditions, and take it to other parts of the world. This way its customers get not only the taste of their chocolates but also a taste of the culture of the local people who make them thus adding value to what they are buying.
The theme of this range is “Traditional Musical Instruments” as music is a very integral part of cultural DNA. The chocolates are named after their country of origin in combination with their traditional musical instrument.
BRAND PERSONALITY & VISUAL LANGUAGE
The brand personality is rustic, culturally rooted, and vibrant. Hence the over all look and feel of the brand is very unsophisticated yet culturally rich.
Mixed media has been used to design the visual language. Dry brush textured background, hand draw pen illustrations of musical instruments, and chosen typography style brings out rustic nature of the brand. The brand color palette is inspired by the vibrant and colorful traditional attires of the local communities. The brand pattern is a series of diamonds, which is a commonly found pattern in traditional textile weaves and jewellery across these cultures.
The logo, the texture, and the illustration style are the three major design elements that bring consistency to the brand language. As the brand grows these three things will remain constant whereas the theme, colors, fonts, and layout can be played around with.
PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT
The purpose of the project was self-learning, to enhance my visual design skills and understand how branding extends into packaging design. The goal was :
a) to learn how to design a visual brand language in a way that is scalable
b) to create a visual brand language with the synthesis of two completely opposite mediums of visual representation i.e digital (softwares) and analog (hand drawn)
In packaging design when we have multiple range of products under a brand category it becomes very tricky to extend the design and maintain design consistency accross all its products to look one brand family. To ensure this it is very important to consider the following points while designing :
1. How the design will be treated when the brand family grows.
2. How to maintain design consistency across various range of products.
3. Which elements will remain constant and which elements will have the flexibility to adapt according to the new product requirements.
These above considerations will help you in designing a consistent and harmonious visual langugage. This will also help in building a clear and coherent design system.
