Navarra is a small boutique agency based in Berlin. Founded by Bartosz Navarra and later joined by Kirill Borisov as a Creative Director. We are a small multidisciplinary team. Our goal is to create and promote sustainable modernist design. We create and develop modern brands and also work on an educational initiative called The Afterschool Special to help young designers understand the anthropology, philosophy and critical theory behind the profession. These things are often overlooked by an art school curriculum, hence the name.
OM is a high-quality German, Clean Beauty cosmetics brand. All the products are developed and produced in south Germany. They approached us to create a comprehensive corporate identity, packaging and then support with brand strategy and brand narrative.
From the beginning we wanted to create an identity that would put all the weight on the quality of its components, be as transparent and natural as possible and would invite scrutiny and deconstruction. A somewhat architectural approach. We thought a lot about the materials we would use for the packaging, how it would reflect/refract light, feel in your hand etc. The resulting object was what we were thinking of when designing. Physical qualities of materials were very important. Raw but delicate textures and colours of the packaging worked as the background for the typography and were the only kind of decoration we needed.
We are big fans of what Dinamo guys are doing generally and as they are our neighbours (Kreuzberg area of Berlin) we try to support them when possible. Also we are big fans of Kasper-Florio, who designed the font. It made absolute sense to use Monument Grotesk because it just was a perfect fit for the project. We wanted a modern grotesk font to create a proper typographic system that would be strong enough to carry the brand and allow us to scale it in the future.
We worked as always in a small team: Creative Director, Junior Art Director, Brand Strategist and Photographer.
We started by understanding what we wanted to achieve. We thought as a Clean Beauty brand we want to channel the quality and purity of the ingredients in the components that make up the brand. That brought us to the visual language based solely on a grotesk typeface. As the product is a physical object we had the luxury of going outside the confines of graphic design and using the textures of materials in the packaging (always left uncoated) as the brand color palette. Once this was set it was a question of a very concise but recognizable layout system that gives the product a strong identity and conveys all the necessary information.
Same thought went into the content production. We wanted to work with different natural materials and combine their textures with the packaging materials. Also as light and its interaction with the object was from the beginning important we shot some pictures with vintage lenses that can reproduce light in a very natural way. We used direct daylight and intricate shadows it produces.
