Jaume Serradelarca and Jordi Masdeu put dreams on wine labels — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

El Trampolí, a foundation in La Bisbal d’Empordà that works with people with intellectual disabilities and their families, asked art director Jaume Serradelarca and Jordi Masdeu to design labels for three bottles of wine. What they came back with was an identity and packaging for a whole collection, named Somnis, where each bottle carries the dream of one young person the foundation supports, drawn on its label. The wine is produced with the winery Vins Can Mas, which advised on the bottle and the paper. “For us, Somnis is a very beautiful initiative that allows us to continue generating additional resources for the people we support and for their day-to-day lives,” explains El Trampolí’s President & Founder Maite Cobos.

“The brief was very short: ‘We want the labels for three bottles of wine – one red, one rosé and one white.’ We did not even have names for them,” Cobos tells us. “Jaume and Jordi researched the history of the Foundation and discovered that, many years earlier, we had created a theatre production called Somnis. Through the play, we sought to represent the idea that people with disabilities can have no limits, and that they can dream big. That is where the idea of calling the collection Somnis came from,” Cobos continues. The collection’s three wines are Tinto, Rosé and Blanco. At the designers’ request, the foundation spoke to the young people and described the dreams that they shared, passing all of them on for the Barcelona-based design duo to interpret.

Every label uses the same system, but the black line drawing changes from one bottle to the next. “We established an area for the text and determined where the brand is positioned, but within that white space – almost as if it were a blank sheet of paper – there is room for expression, which is where the illustration sits,” Serradelarca explains. “There is genuinely no sequence or particular logic. If there is a different dream for every person, and each of us dreams something different every day, then dreams become almost infinite, don’t they? The continuity lies more in the system we mentioned earlier, and in the illustrative style and art direction. But they are different stories, different chapters,” he adds.

The brand name is set in the script typeface Quatre, from the foundry Blank Is The New Black, while everything else on the label is set in Baskerville. “We were looking for a strong contrast between the two typefaces,” Serradelarca details. “Using Baskerville at a very restrained size, with its inherent elegance and with the composition allowing it to occupy its own space, seemed to us an ideal way of incorporating information and content without being too intrusive – almost allowing it to go slightly unnoticed.”

“We felt that the most sincere approach was to enter the design through the illustration – in black and white, without pretension – and then allow people to begin reading the texts and gradually realise that what they are holding is not simply a bottle of wine bought in a supermarket, but a project that goes beyond the product, with the Foundation, its values and its mission behind it,” Serradelarca tells us. “My former boss at Mucho, Pablo, once said something along the lines of, ‘You shouldn’t design for those who look, but for those who observe.’” “Essentially, in design we are always trying to create that dual gaze, or double reading, as if the design itself were a tunnel through which you gradually discover the elements that make it up – and in the right order, the one determined by the designer.”

Illustrator Irati Peluaga has worked with the designers many times on previous projects, so their partnership naturally continued for Somnis. “The only brief she received consisted of the short descriptions of the dreams that El Trampolí had shared with us. The main parameters were that the illustrations should be executed with a fine line, and that we should move away from any sense of ‘rigidity’ – in other words, from a more geometric or linear illustrative style. From that point onwards, she began to dream,” Serradelarca explains. “She produced a great many illustrations, which we discussed and commented on, making observations along the way. But as designers, we like to step back to a certain extent and allow illustrators to do what they do best, because they know much more about that particular language than we do. When discussing the first illustrations, we went through them one by one, trying to understand what lay beneath each of those dreams,” Serradelarca adds. “Sometimes there is a single character; sometimes a dream is shared by two people; sometimes it is more literal – dreaming while lying on a pillow – and sometimes it is more free-form, such as flying through the clouds,” Serradelarca details. “For us, it was always important to show different actions, because this allowed us to speak about this ‘infinity of dreams.’”

“We always wanted to avoid symbols, taglines or drawing attention through the use of colour,” Serradelarca notes. “For the same reason, we also ruled out coloured foils, embossing, speciality papers and so on. The same principle applies to the wine capsule – the metallic closure at the top of the bottle. We decided to leave it black, without adding anything else.”

Before settling on black and white, the designers tested illustrations that introduced colour into the line work. “This was probably the decision that took us the longest to make,” Serradelarca explains. “Colour coding – at least here in Spain – is widely used and tends to be repetitive according to the type of wine; for example, reds are more commonly associated with red wine, while greens and blues are more often used for white wine. However, we felt that introducing colour meant that we were beginning to over-interpret the dream itself. The sky is blue, or orange at sunset, isn’t it? But why couldn’t it be purple? Or silver? It is a dream, so why not?” he continues. “We therefore concluded that, in a way, the absence of colour could be synonymous with an infinity of colours. It is similar to what happens with children’s colouring books, where they are given pre-existing illustrations to colour in. In the end, a small child might pick up brown and colour a strawberry if that is what they feel like doing.”