How Much Is The Fish?

No, it's not about Scooter, it's ofFISHially my first blog post about fish products design. It had been quite a while since I had done such work, so I was pretty excited when I received the order (two similar orders from different customers, actually, but we'll get to that later).

Near the end of last month I was contacted by an old client of mine -- a company which hadn't been working with me for a few years due to the management change and other stuff unimportant to the reader. It was sort of a return of the prodigal son and I gladly agreed to work with them again, because we had done some good stuff together years back.

First things first -- we needed a trademark for their new brand, Oceanida. Not to confuse with the sea mollusks -- they actually meant an Oceanid from Greek mythology, but the thing is that both words are spelled as "okeanida" in Georgian, so they chose to spell the English part of the brand accordingly. They didn't give me complete freedom on this: they wanted a certain type of imagery, while my task was to realize their ideas and come up with an optimal manifestation for them. It all resulted in quite a beaten kind of a logo, nothing really original -- but, hey, as long as the customer is happy, who am I to whine?

So, the next task was to create a side label for a caviar tin can. In fact, it was to be printed directly on the can. They wanted a minimalistic style for that, but still allowed me to cheer up the things a bit by throwing in some digitally cultivated grains of caviar. Anyway, here's the result -- a Georgian caviar! And here I was thinking that stuff was being harvested only in northern seas. Or maybe they are importing it from somewhere else -- there was no indication of that on the label and I didn't pry into details.

Next we had salted herring, and lots of it (8 kilos in a large white plastic can, to be precise). I only needed to cover the sides of the can, not the top. The first demos were brutally rejected and for a quite long time we were unable to reach a solution that would please everyone. Then, finally, I managed to "give birth" to an "all-pleaser" which I proudly present below. I also did a rough 2D simulation of the actual product to have a better idea what it would look like on the shelf.

Somewhere in the process of making this herring, I was contacted by another old customer of mine, who, coincidentally, also wanted to order a herring can design. Interestingly, the company is called Okros Tevzi ("goldfish"), but they had been working exclusively with the meat products before and it was the first time they had actually decided to make "something fishy."

They made two separate orders -- one for a larger can with whole herrings and another one for a smaller can with cut herrings. I was unable to find any cut herring to my liking in stock images, so I decided to cut the fish myself. Here it is -- both cut and uncut:

The designs for both customers haven't been printed yet, it's in the process. Hopefully, everything's gonna be alright, they will sell lots of it and come back with more fish orders. I like fish!