I don’t write a lot about my work here, which is mainly random design projects for small business clients.
My most active client is Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, my family’s tinned fish business. I design fun things for them from package labels to infographics and beyond. My brother-in-law, Dan, has a million cool ideas and I get to help with some of them.
Recently, Dan reached out to me with a problem he knew I’d have a graphic solution to. He was about to become the only retailer in the US carrying a full line of anchovies from El Capricho. It was an array of 12 options – four different sizes of fish, three packing oils, and three sizes of tin.
With a dozen variations of a similar product, how could these be displayed on the website to make ordering easier?
As Dan described the problem, I was already designing a solution. By the time we finished chatting, I had sketched a layout on some scrap paper.
Here’s what I did. I made a master design that included fish, oil, and tin size. The fish and tins are done as visual comparisons. The fish are lined up by size with the packed size in black. The tin sizes are nested with the fill extending to the correct edge. For oil, there are two hints – a drawing of the plant the oil came from and the background color of the graphic itself. There is also text for quick comparison at smaller sizes on the website.
It is information dense, so I make sure to keep the elements as simple as possible. The palette is 5 colors: El Capricho’s signature black and gold plus three colors to indicate the oil types. I used the logo’s font for the text. The illustrations are all fine-line pen and ink to match this classic brand.
And here’s how it looks on the site:
There is one thing about the design I think could be improved. I feel the tin size is easy to mistake if you aren’t looking closely. If I were to redo it, I’d replace the olive and sunflower illustrations with the tin weight. The background color does a clear job of differentiating the oil, making the illustration superfluous. But, overall I am happy with this work.
AND, as a wonderful bonus, the manufacturer gave RTG some terrific explanations of why there are so many variations. So I made a series of social posts Dan could use when they launched the line.
If you are hungry for anchovies now, I recommend you shop at RTG because they are the only shop in the US that has the full El Capricho anchovy lineup. And 894 other tinned fish options, too.
