Featured image for Studio Spotlight: Anagrama

Studio Spotlight: Anagrama

by Diane Lindquist on 08/12/2013 | 12 Minute Read

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Anagrama started in 2008 in Monterrey, México. Comprising of only its three founders: Sebastian Padilla, Gustavo Muñoz and Mike Herrera initially worked in a tiny spare room in Muñoz's house. Since its creation, Anagrama decided to break the traditional creative agency scheme, integrating multidisciplinary teams of creative and business experts. Five years later, Anagrama has exponentially grown with keenly established offices in both Monterrey and México City, taking on bigger and more challenging projects encompassing brand development, design and development of objects, spaces, software and multimedia projects around the world.

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All projects below are designed by Anagrama, Monterrey & México City, México

Photography by Caroga Photographer

OLIVE GOLD

Olive Gold is a cold-pressed, 100% extra virgin olive oil. Olive Gold is Olivarera Italo-Mexicana's ultra premium brand. Olive Gold targets the global high-end section of its category and is marketed through word-of-mouth and luxury communication channels. It is only available in a few upscale gourmet stores and luxury-chic hotels.

Our brand proposal aims to not only elevate the brand's values (elegance, exclusivity, purity and tradition) but to stand out in a medium where its competitors' identities either border on boring antiquity or icy cold minimalism. The idea was to design a brand that was both simple and traditional without falling into either extreme.We played with the idea of the oil's color and richness, and so came up with the products name: Olive Gold. The type is custom made to have an easy but tight fit on the bottle. The logo's elegant, golden serif typeface is juxtaposed with the bottle's black simplicity to convey a modern look that embraces its traditional character.

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SMARTAS

Smartas is a brand dealing in lively and bold disposable articles. Their prime commodity is toilet tissue, which is sold in various color and odor presentations.

Our objective consisted in designing a visual idea that represented Smartas' fun and youthful spirit.The logo depicts a mortarboard and toilet tissue combination, a conceptual wink at the brand's cheeky naming. The proposal is simple, a deliberate decision meant to highlight the paper's bright colors. We used a rounded typeface to give the brand a friendly and sincere personality.

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DOCE CIELOS

Doce Cielos is a brand specializing in traditional handcrafted honey-based products. Their mission is to encourage the recognition and consumption of these native Mexican apiculture products, emphasizing the product’s richness in flavor, texture, color and benefits to personal health.

The packaging lines make allusion to traditional handcrafted Mexican paintings and art pieces. Our proposal achieves a sophisticated link between the Mexican handcrafts heritage and the honey’s sweet traditional essence.Since the brand’s primary products are honey-based, we chose a bee for the logo.

The packaging design praises the great variety of honey varieties using a categorization based visual system and nomenclature. The typography is meant to convey the cleanliness and elegance of the product.

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BONNARD

Bonnard is a Mexican french-inspired tea and confectionary shop.

The brand's distinct brush strokes and color selection are based on Pierre Bonnard's postimpressionist paintings. The simple art direction, together with french words and phonetics round up the brand's gallic concept effortlessly, spontaneously and efficiently.

Our approach with clean, sans-serif typography gives Bonnard a luxurious feel mostly associated with high-end fashion brands.The gold foil stamp and clean type directly contrasts and at the same time elevates the would-be informal paint marks.

The rounded cross icon detail found in the wording relates to the shapes of macaroons, one of Bonnard's prime delicacies.

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BERMELLÓN

México is a country widely recognized for its spicy culinary culture. Those who know little about our country, are amazed to find out that besides spicy dishes all types of candy are also infused with these flavors.

Bermellon is a Mexican hot candy confectionery shop, whose products are very popular in the country. The company's main objective is to claim these types of traditional treats found on Mexican streets and markets.

The brand's greatest success consists in taking these traditional flavored products to a premium buying experience through their packaging, excellent raw materials usage and hand-crafted cooking techniques.

Our proposal reflects sophistication values that the brand promotes using an elegant typographic palette and a logotype with allusion to a family's monogram. The selected vivid colors constantly remind us about the product's extreme acid and spicy flavors.

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SALVATIERRA

Salvatierra is a brand specializing in producing premium organic goods from several Latin American countries and distributing them to South Korea's eager food lovers. The products range from coffee to sugar to delicious and diverse cooking oils.

Our design proposal uses flag icons to exalt the product's origins and gold foil to express it's premium quality. The logo depicts a pair of hands holding an abstract item, a mixture of snowflake and plant that makes allusion to nature, while the letter S helps tie the overall look of the logo with the brand's name.In Spanish, the name Salvatierra translates to "Earth Saver", so the logotype symbolizes the brand's commitment to nature and conservation as well as to the delivery of a product of supreme quality. We used a simple typography to dignify the text and to finish rounding up the brand's premium nature.

Our proposal is simple, destined to strongly stand out in its simplicity and cleanliness against overwhelming and noisy Asian packaging that dominates South Korea's market aisles. The design is transparent and honest, meant to be exceedingly clear over what is being bought.

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CARAMELA

Caramela is a chocolate boutique located in Monterrey, Mexico.

This city differentiates historically for having an industrial golden era in the steel manufacturing. As part of the concept, we considered these historical values to inspire the brand to simulate a high-end handcrafted chocolate factory.

The packaging design is inspired on industrial packaging systems. We used adhesive stickers and identification codes as part of the brand's language stylizing them with simple layouts and joyful colors.

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CATALINA FERNANDEZ

Catalina Fernandez is your typical home based bakery that started in 1988 and eventually became a successful pastry shop. Along with the shop's growth came the need to open more branches and to penetrate new generations of potential clients.

When the client approached us, she told us her desire of upgrading the brand to a much more sophisticated style. Based on this requirement we developed a very elegant identity, with a sans serif typeface to keep the brand neutral and give it a chance to evolve in the long run, with new designs for their packaging and other printed pieces.The various boxes and bags were decorated with details in golden foil that, like Catalina's pastries, took many hours of attention to detail.

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SANTA CRUZ

Santa Cruz is a quick service Mexican BBQ restaurant located in Santa Catarina, a municipality of the greater Monterrey area in northeast Mexico. Santa Cruz's menu contains food such as brisket and baby-back ribs slow-cooked to tender perfection and offered in an array of different ready-to-go, conventional styles such as burgers and tacos. 

The hand-made quality of the logotype and overall identity is meant to praise the careful, traditional and apprehensive food making process of Santa Cruz.The brand is simple and direct, and above all, always honest and sincere, never attempting to hide its conceptual rugged awkwardness. Destined to be franchised in the future, Santa Cruz's honest and handcrafted demeanor will inevitably be distinctive amid all other, more synthetic fast food chain restaurants.

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THEUREL & THOMAS

Theurel & Thomas is the first pâtisserie in Mexico specialized in French macarons, the most popular dessert of the French pastries.

For this project it was very important to create an imposing brand that would emphasize the unique value, elegance and detail of this delicate dessert.

White was our primary tool for design. As a result of this the attention was fully oriented to the colorful macarons. We placed two lines in our design in cyan and magenta, as a relation with a modern French flag to inject a vanguard vision to the identity. We selected Didot (created by Firmin and Pierre Didot), a French typography that would present the brand with sophistication.

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TOSCATTI

Toscatti is a new brand of high endurance kitchenware. Their products are both very practical and long lasting.

The client approached us to develop the brand's naming, identity and package design.

For now the brand has more than a dozen containers, each with different size and capacity characteristics. Therefore we developed a packaging system that would categorize the containers in a practical manner.Each product's capacity specifications come first in the design's hierarchy, and the distinctive colors come second.

For the logotype we created a typeface with geometrical shapes, but rounded strokes in order to give it a friendly feel.

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