Momo’s Meals is a new range of organic soups, risottos and baked beans from Australian based manufacturer Didi’s Food Adventures.
The range’s packaging and branding, designed by The Anatomy and illustrated by freelance graphic designer and illustrator Georgina Luck , utilises a loose brush-stroke, watercolour and paint splash aesthetic, earthy colour palette and a bold but quirky typographic approach to capture the natural and wholesome aspect of the ingredients and crafted nature of the recipes.“‘Momo’s Meals’ is so called as a tribute to Didi’s mum “Momo” who has been creating and cooking delicious and comforting food for as long as he can remember. The range is certified as organic and free of bad things but Didi goes that extra mile by adding ingredients such as house made stocks, fragrant freshly picked herbs and local farmhouse cheeses. Currently there are a total of 10 products, and the aim was to show the main ingredient illustrated as the hero image for the front of the pack.”- Taken from the Georgina Luck website
Georgina’s watercolour illustrations are a simple but exuberant mixture of colour, texture and motion, a solid contrast of light and shadow alongside depth and detail that works really well to resolve the themes of organic produce and big robust flavour. The paint splashes introduce a proprietary twist to an increasingly popular illustrative style as well as nice sense of movement, spontaneity and craft, emphasised by the subtle textures that emerge through the brush strokes, that neatly communicates the energetic fusion of ingredients and the culinary creativity involved in their combination. Together these intentionally rough details provide Momo’s with a very open and rustic quality ideal for natural foods created through straightforward production processes with no artificial intervention.
The vitality and life achieved through the vibrant watercolour palette of recent fruit based products like Lovella give way to a far more earthy, wholesome and hearty richness that capture the warmth and carbohydrate heavy mix of beans and root vegetables which remains natural throughout. Set against a clean and fairly voluminous white background, the illustrations and the product, via a clear window at the base, deliver significant contrast with a clean and contemporary finish.
The typography at the heart of the pack, through an inconsistent baseline, geometry, extended terminals and absence of straight lines, introduce a slightly quirky handmade sensibility that builds draws on the illustrative work while adding an underlying uppercase formality that suggests good quality. These sit well at the centre of the illustrative work and form a significant part of a simple and clear vertical hierarchy of information. The script and the choice of language are a little tired and unimaginative but these add a light informality, a (basic) tone of voice and an annotated cook-book quality that counters the weight of the logo-type on the right and reinforces the idea of simple but wholesome home cooked meals.
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A ribbon, underlined ‘a’ and black band offer a subtle, conventional and implied sense of tradition and heritage that compliment the wide and agricultural slab serif letter-forms of the Momo’s logo-type. These create a slightly simpler but darker contrast to the composition of the illustrations but are neatly bound together by a similar water treatment. While an increasingly familiar aesthetic within the natural health food sector, Georgina’s illustrative style, one that she applies to the majority of her work, is distinctive and dynamic, cleverly matched by a good eye for type, structure, layout and ‘traditional’ design cues. A neat resolution that clearly communicates bold flavour, creative recipes, healthy hearty ingredients and an honest approach to preparation confidently executed across a packaging solution that has a contemporary cleanliness.
Opinion by Richard Baird
