Behind the Dynamic 60s-Inspired Design for Winter Milk Ice Cream

Ice cream cones, popsicles, milk shakes, frappes, and desserts of all kind—if you’ve got a sweet tooth, then you’ll be right at home at Winter Milk. The brightly colored design sparks a sense of nostalgia for simpler times, perfectly aligned with their mission to provide sweets made only from natural ingredients. We spoke with Anagrama to find out more about defining the concept for Winter Milk, giving new life to saturated markets, creating a brand with a future to expand, and more.

Walk us through the design process that you went through for this project.

Anagrama: When the project arrived to the studio, the most difficult challenge was being able to create an environment for the whole family, where you could enjoy a delicious ice cream, cake or coffee. We started thinking about the name—it had to be a name that described the product and at the same time spoke about the quality of its ingredients. The project should be replicable to great scale, therefore the applications and dispositions of patterns and texts should be considered for different formats. The principal inspiration were the cafeterias in the 60’s; we wanted to create a place that felt warm, inviting and delicious. 

What was one of the biggest goals you set out to achieve with Winter Milk packaging and how did you accomplish it?

Anagrama: The most important challenge was to create a brand system that let us play with different typographies, elements and patterns that made each brand application dynamic, unique and interesting. 

How did you combine and strike a fine balance with the inspiration from history, climates, and even film?

Anagrama: All our projects start by defining a concept. A lot of times these concepts come from inspirations of cinema, music, art, etc. It’s a really interesting experiment—it achieves really fresh ideas, that translate to a nice graphic of really unexpected forms. The balance has to be careful; for example, if the history it’s an aggregated value of the brand or if the origin of its ingredients are worth a lot talking about it, each brand has a history that follows them.

How did you take the idea of enjoying ice cream the traditional way with natural ingredients and give it a fresh look for a modern audience?

Anagrama: First it was important to take a look to all that’s happening around us, evaluate direct and indirect competition…and sure, think about an original and refreshing way of speaking about the natural ice cream. The market can easily become saturated, so it’s good from time to time to turn the page on what has been already seen and take some risks. In some way it is a closer look to modernity but with a classic or traditional feeling. It is like a new past. 

What was the most challenging part of this project?

Anagrama: Because it is a growing brand, it was important to think that the brand should be able to repeat itself in different types of spaces. We don’t have control over all the locations for example. Another difficult challenge was to understand that the competition is not necessarily ice cream shops but cafeterias and places where the people spends a lot of time working or enjoying a coffee and a dessert.

If you could pick one aspect of the finished design that you like the most or feel especially proud of, what would it be and why?

Anagrama: The signage. The Wintermilk logotype was thought from the beginning to live in a signage context—we even had planned the materials on where we would love to see the logo before developing the physical space that connected with the 60’s inspiration.

Share a lesson that you learned while developing the finished product.

Anagrama: Working with franchise type brands requires of a particular attention. The brand applications must be aesthetic, practical and functional. I think that an important knowledge of this project was to understand that the audience is really open, and the design should respond to that necessity and communicate effectively.