New brand balances heritage and modernity for Korontini olive oil
All Purpose Studio and James Rogers have designed a striking new brand and packaging for Korontini olive oil.
The extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) has been made by the same family on Crete for five generations, and has been sold by Georgia Spanos’ dad for the past 40 years.
Now Spanos, a London-based food writer, has taken over the business, and she’s on a mission to bring its unique flavour to a bigger audience.
“It wasn’t getting the recognition it should, so I wanted to bring it into a more modern context – without changing what makes it special – and help share it with more people who genuinely care about quality,” Spanos explains.
Korontini is made using the small koroneiki olives, native to Crete, which are renowned for their strong taste.
“They are tiny but world-famous for their flavour,” Spanos says. “They are grown in a very hot and dry part of Crete meaning they are ‘stressed’ which is actually good for olives to produce punchy flavours.”
The oil’s low acidity creates a purer taste, and Korontini – the name is a hybrid of koroneiki and tiny – won a silver medal at the World Olive Oil Competition in New York.
To bring the new brand to life, Spanos commissioned London-based All Purpose Studio and James Rogers, both of whom she’d worked with before. The brief was to modernise the product without jettisoning its heritage.
“It needed to clearly communicate that we’re not a new, trend-driven brand that’s jumped on the EVOO bandwagon with no real roots,” Spanos says. “While it is a new brand name with a new look and feel, it’s built on decades of experience, long-standing relationships, and generations of knowledge.
“I see the brand as a bridge between generations – honouring the craftsmanship and history, while making it feel relevant and accessible to a new audience who may be discovering truly great olive oil for the first time.”
Rogers says the designers were given a lot of creative freedom to develop their ideas, and how best to marry tradition and modernity. The new look had to work in different retail contexts, “something you might find comfortably nestled on the shelf of an old Mediterranean deli, or sold in a modern boutique grocer,” Rogers explains.
“There was also a very clear requirement to create a design object that should be proudly displayed in the kitchen, rather than hidden away in the pantry,” he adds.
For research, he looked not only at 20th Century olive oil, but also sardine cans, aperitif bottles, film posters and hand-painted shop signs.
“I usually start my process by scribbling the word repeatedly to see what patterns and similarities emerge in the letterforms,” Rogers says. “Korontini tended to have a strong repetition of stems and diagonal legs, along with the two o’s that were in contrast.”
From there, he set about paring the letterforms back to their “absolute essentials”, a creative approach which also mirrored the simple, stripped-back cold-press extraction used to produce the oil.
For the r, Rogers took the Γ symbol from the Greek alphabet (even though it denotes gamma, or g) and mirrored it to create the t. He also elongated the two o’s, “to suggest the natural shape of the olives themselves.”
Once the logotype had been finalised, All Purpose came in to create the packaging and expand the brand world. Co-founder and creative director Alex Gross says the traditional tin can provided a “brilliant canvas” to bring the design language to life.
“As a designer, I think there’s an art in stripping back the noise when it’s not necessary,” Gross explains.
“Using the silver of the tin was a great asset – it was then about adding the right colour, and using it so it was still perfectly legible but not overbearing. The material of the can becomes more dominant than the type, giving an air of subtlety to the type applied to it.”
The use of terracotta as the main additional colour was inspired by the colour of the soil in the olive groves, and ancient amphorare, the two-handled ceramic pots used to store olive oil and wine.
Gross made some minor changes to the logo – “a slight rounding of the corners, and a reduction of the overshoots on the o’s to make it slightly more optically balanced,” he says.
“The rounding of the corners also felt more in line with the curves of the tin, as well as giving a subtle nod to the texture of the oil.”
He chose Alte Haas Grotesk as the main typeface, which Gross says complements the rounded logo, and creates a nod to, “the viscosity of the oil and how it pools.”
There is flexibility built into the design system too, so that it can be tailored to different applications. “The logo and direction of the type shuffles around depending on the space we have to use,” Gross explains.
Koroneiki’s new look launched last autumn, and Spanos says the early signs have been very encouraging.
“People are responding strongly to the tin format, especially the decision to print directly onto it, and there’s a real appreciation for moving away from plastic squeezy bottles,” she explains.
“It’s been exciting to see customers not only buying the oil for its quality, but also not wanting to throw out the tins as they look pretty. That tells me the story and the values are landing.”