Plakton pares Olicatessen’s olive oil identity down to the essential

Olicatessen is a family business with an agricultural tradition, producing organic olive oil at Molí dels Torms in Lleida, Spain. For the design of its identity, packaging and e-commerce site, the producer turned to Barcelona-based studio Plakton, which took its lead from the product itself and reduced everything else to match. The concept started from the essential and the primary, stripping away everything superfluous, much as olive oil starts from something as pure and basic as the olive. “Since the product itself is so essential, we wanted the brand to reflect that same philosophy from the very beginning,” Art Director Roser Padrés tells us, the aim being to convey authenticity, sobriety and closeness across every expression and to strike a balance between gourmet and honesty. “Paradoxically, creating something this simple is often more difficult than creating something complex,” she adds. That thinking resolves into a clean and elegant visual system that works on a typographic and compositional level, from a serif wordmark to the wider identity, with a small radiating burst mark alongside it and olive-grove photography running through. “The labels still needed to organise information clearly and help customers distinguish between different products,” Padrés explains, the difficulty being to find “hierarchy without adding noise.”