It’s not uncommon for design and branding agencies to create a little something special around the holiday season to express their gratitude to the clients they’ve had throughout the year. We’ve seen it in the past with Serious Studio’s Seriously Good Chocolate Gift and Stranger and Stranger’s Bitter & Twisted holiday pack, but what we haven’t seen are holiday-themed infographics made of chocolate.
Motivated to stand out amongst a sea of gifts, Madrid-based design agency Auriga decided to combine the thing marketing directors love the most—data.
Right? I mean, we all love data, right?
Except for this time they did data with delicious, bite-sized chocolates. Arriving in a pack of four, each box of chocolate tackles a different way to express data, from pie charts to bar graphs, and then depicts the facts with a variety of chocolate. For example, the piecharts made of milk and white chocolate showcase statistics focusing on the ways members of the Auriga team decorate their house throughout the season.
Blown away by the sheer creativity and attention to detail, we reached out to Auriga’s creative director Javier Bidezabal to get the 411.
Walk us through the design process. How did you go from start to finish on this project?
We wanted to create something that extended beyond packaging, as well as create an experience that would help our clients understand the Christmas season. When you are opening the gift, you are discovering the different perspectives that make Christmas, well, Christmas.
First, we wanted you to discover something fun, so we decided to tell you about how much time did we spend listening to Christmas carols. From there, you open the box, and you see the breakdown of the data through the infographic. At the end of the experience, after you’ve eaten all of your data, your idea of Christmas has visually changed.
Each collection comes in a pack of four. What was the inspiration behind each of the infographics you decided to use, and why did you choose chocolate to display them?
The challenge was to give something physical that was ethereal as data into a product. As almost everyone loves data, we looked into something else that people love, like chocolate.
Additionally, we wanted to give data that explained insights into Christmas, such as the time we spend listening to Christmas carols, while also helping them understand the consumption and behavior of people around the holidays in hopes they could apply it to their products and holiday campaigns.
To add on to that, what type of statistics does one find in the infographics outside of “The best-selling nativity scene figurine was Donald Trump?” And is that true?
We extracted all the data from consultants like Accenture or Delloite. The data we found never stopped surprising us as we discovered statistics on the amount of accidents related to the uncorking of champagne or the number of chokings that we did not include in the end. So all the data is true. We spent more than a month looking for them.
What type of chocolate do you have available in the kits, and how did you decide what flavors would be right for the Christmas kit?
We used three kinds of chocolate: white chocolate, milk chocolate, and dark chocolate. We also paid to have them dyed them to get more contrast in the infographics. We were considering the possibility of changing the flavor depending on the data. For example, if we have data about the consumption of prawns, we wanted to make a chocolate flavored with the sea, but it complicated the production and, finally, we had to discard it.
Why did you opt for a minimalistic design with just black font on a white background, and how did this convey experience you wanted your clients to have when unboxing the goods?
We wanted to make a premium product because today, one of the most valuable things in the market, is data. We also wanted to give it a minimalist touch, which is how many data sources usually present themselves. And it was funny to give a sophisticated and elegant touch to some data that is quite absurd.
With such a genius, award-winning idea down, do you have any thoughts on how you’re going to one-up the gifts for Christmas 2019?
We have some good ideas, maybe with a social or environmental element, but we can not tell you yet!
