2024
Brand identity
Posters, packaging, social
Self-initiated

Cantina

Italian casual dining looks the same everywhere: a tricolour, a script logotype, a photograph of somebody's grandmother. Cantina drops all three and builds the brand out of a single word, set large enough to read from across the street.

A category that copies itself

Walk down any high street and the Italian places announce themselves in the same handwriting. Green, white and red. Warm wood. A close-up of cheese pulling apart. The signals are so widely shared that they have stopped signalling anything, and a new place is left with nothing to be recognised by.

A wall fly-posted with the Cantina campaign, the same two artworks tiled across it, a passer-by blurred in front. — Fly-posting The system tiled at scale

The name is the poster

So the name does the work. CANTINA is not placed on the poster, it is the poster: a condensed grotesque scaled past the edge of the format and repeated until it becomes the background. You read it before you know you are reading.

Poster: a hand holding a slice of pizza in violet duotone over lime lettering repeating the word Cantina. — The five posters One duotone each

Poster: a hand holding a filled roll in coral duotone over pale blue, the word Cantina stacked four times behind it. — The five posters One duotone each

Food that isn't trying to look delicious

Every photograph is flattened to a two-colour duotone: violet on lime, coral on baby blue, green on cream. The food turns graphic instead of appetising, which is the point. It survives being printed badly at A1, and it still reads at thumbnail size in a feed - the two places the category's glossy close-ups fall apart.

On the table Five seconds, no sound

Six colours, four rules

One typeface. Six colours. One photographic treatment. Three stickers. The palette never mixes more than three of its colours in a single piece, which is what stops a system this loud from turning into noise.

Warm cream#FFF3E7
Neon lime#D8FF92
Baby blue#D8E6FF
Violet blue#5454E8
Orange red#FF6446
Lucky green#2E9E66

Colourway change The same layout, six ways

The stickers carry the voice

BENVENUTO, BEST ITALIAN FOOD, MAMMA MIA. They sit on the artwork like something applied after it was printed, which is what keeps typography this loud from turning corporate. They are also the only place the brand speaks Italian, so the accent stays a garnish rather than a costume.

Ribbons Fifteen seconds, press play

The same system, three formats

A1 pasted on the street. A pizza box in one ink. A 1080×1350 feed. Nothing is redrawn between them; the rules simply run at a different size. The box is the cheapest of the three and does the most work, because it leaves the restaurant and lands on somebody else's table.

Pizza boxes laid out on a violet ground, printed in one ink with the word Cantina repeating across the lid and two stickers applied. — Pizza box One ink on board

A white takeaway bag on a lime ground reading Eat like an Italian in coral, with two stickers. — Takeaway bag Headline as pattern

Social post on pale blue reading Best wood-fire pizza, with a violet duotone hand holding a slice. — Social post Same rules at thumb size

Five Cantina posts shown as a run of feed cards on a green ground, alternating typographic and duotone layouts. — The feed Read as a run, not one by one

What it comes down to

The test of a system is whether somebody else can run it. Cantina's fits on one page: one typeface, six colours, one photographic treatment, three stickers. A manager can lay out next week's poster in an afternoon and it will still look like Cantina - which is the whole idea, because the studio should not be the bottleneck.

Cantina is a self-initiated Bored Jar project. No restaurant of this name exists or was involved.

Design work

hello@boredjar.com