Pack of the Month: Tallo Gets a Juicy Visual Identity Courtesy of Argentina's Paz Miamor

The year is young, but Pack of the Month continues to roll on unabated in our quest to bring you the absolute best packaging of the last 30 days as chosen by you, the readers (or at least the top four determined by Instagram engagement and Google Analytics that our editorial staff votes on).

And to kick off 2023, y'all went straight with a typographic gut punch, courtesy of Argentinian design studio Paz Miamor. Tallo is a new-to-market cold-pressed juice brand out of Buenos Aires with vibrant colors and a popcorn-ed geometric display wordmark with oodles of personality.

We spoke with Gaston Garcia Aja, co-director and graphic designer at Paz Miamor, about what inspired the visual identity and some of the packaging challenges they faced.

Tell us about the design process for this project.

Tallo was a quick project with a lot of freedom to work on the brief and implement it. Throughout the design process, we tried to convey a feeling rather than concepts or commercial aspects. As such, all the tests we did revolved around emotion.

What was one of the biggest goals you set out to achieve with the Tallo packaging, and how did you achieve it?

We felt that organic products were not encouraged to sport modern and simple designs in this part of the world. There is a belief that the design should be more austere to represent this category, as the high-end design is left more for industrial or expensive organic products. Without going to extremes, we tried to break away from that and attempt to approach the category differently.

What was your inspiration for the typography?

"Tallo" means "stem" in Spanish. From here, we tried to represent the flowers and fruits rather than the stem itself. We like the word and the design to have two different intentions. With juice, we see how many fruits come together to achieve a result. We tried to emulate this until we generated a typeface based on geometric shapes that were legible and friendly.

What was the hardest part of this project?

The bottle. In recent years, one of the most important challenges we had with packaging is the ability to create high-quality, interesting designs that are as kind to the planet as possible—this is a must.

That meant using as few resources as possible to reduce the carbon footprint of the packaging. In this case, the bottle is a lightweight, un-printed plastic with a columnar design that reduces the space available for labeling. It is also not the prettiest.

The print quality was also restricted. So many design decisions took these limitations into account to get the best out of this project.

If you could choose one aspect of the final design that you liked the most or were particularly proud of, what would it be and why?

The feeling. The feeling of this packaging is everything, and we believe it fully aligns with the product and the brand. One small gesture that makes us very happy is that the illustrations depicting the ingredients of each juice have a very childlike aesthetic that is a nod to the drawings created by the project owner’s young daughter. Though the connection between the packaging and the owner’s daughter isn’t evident to the consumers, it's what we do.

Share a lesson you learned during the development of the final product.

Try again, and trust. We tested a lot of designs before settling on the final version. We also carried out tests to find the best suitable materials and colors for each juice. We knew there were many ways to represent the feeling of this project, but we had to trust one and do our best.