Pedro Vareta Studio rebuilds ELA Wines from bottles, labels and boxes

After more than 40 years in the market, ELA Wines’ identity was little more than a clichéd bottle logo. When Pedro Vareta Studio was brought in to rethink the brand, they made an unexpected choice. Instead of starting over, the new wordmark keeps the bottle and multiplies it through a smart and surprising solution. The three letters of ELA are built from the silhouettes of bottles, labels and boxes, with each character constructed through positive and negative space. ELA is a mobile provider of bottling, labelling and packaging services, supporting wineries across the Iberian Peninsula directly on site through a fleet of trucks that travel from estate to estate. The client arrived attached to the old bottle mark and initially wanted only a refresh. “We quickly realised that reworking the existing symbol would only lead to an exhausted formula,” Vareta tells us. Instead, the studio, alongside Pedro Duarte, set out to repeat the bottle inside a tighter system, using the square box as the base geometry for the letters and exploring the bottle silhouette both vertically and horizontally within that frame. The letterforms came together quickly once the concept was set. A label detail entered as a fix for the crossbar of the ‘A,’ drawn as a thin horizontal block sitting where the bar would normally run, and they liked the effect enough to repeat it in the ‘E,’ lending the wordmark an almost slab-serif quality. Underpinning all of it is Helvetica Black. The characters were widened, a wedge serif was added to the top of the ‘A,’ and the bottle forms were worked into the white space between and inside the letters. “In the end, Helvetica Black worked only as the structural pillar of the logo, with all the details being created from scratch,” Vareta reveals. On the cliché he set out to dodge, he is direct: “We wanted to avoid a bottle logo! Like the client already used… We feel very proud to have come up with a logo that has even more bottles :), without looking like a clichéd bottle logo.”