Responses by Perniclas Bedow, chief executive officer, Bedow.
Background: Swee is a new kombucha brewery in Tbilisi, Georgia. Compared to its competitors, Swee’s strength is that it’s 100-percent natural with a live bacteria culture. The purpose was to position Swee as the go-to kombucha for a conscious and culinary target group.
Design thinking: Many kombuchas are branded with an “organic” or “crafty” design—we thought that if we went the other way around and made the design super rational, it would stand out on the shelf. So, we designed a grid system with one hundred squares, and each square is filled with a color representing a percent of an ingredient. The front of the label acts as a rational infographic system of Swee’s ingredients.
Challenges: When we designed the grid system and filled them with colors, we felt that the whole design had become a bit flat. The flat look didn’t match a product filled with living yeast and bacteria, so we chose to interpret each ingredient in the form of a pattern. Each flavor has its own background pattern. The most challenging part was to get those patterns to look good in print. We elaborated a lot on the thickness of the strokes and did several test prints to get it right.
Favorite details: Designing a system that stands out on the shelf but also can be used to distinguish a range of products. It’s not always that easy to solve both of those problems.
Visual influences: When we discussed creating a rational infographic system, I thought about the Windows 95 defrag process. I remember in the ’90s when I was defragging my first PC, waiting and waiting for these squares to fill up to 100 percent. That defrag image was the only reference I showed to our designer, and I asked if we could do something as rational as that.
Specific project demands: The production budget was very restrained, and we could not work with any fancy materials or printing methods besides offset print on standard paper. Low budget is always one of my favorite limitations, though: it forces you to solve your problems in intelligent ways.
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