Bearing in mind that Croatia is a country with beautiful nature, high mountains and almost 6000 km of Adriatic coast (mainland and over 1200 islands), it becomes obvious that tourism plays a significant role. Wanting to offer something different for the visiting tourists, the marketing agency I worked for entrusted me with the creation of a suitable brand and product line of unique souvenirs that would be distributed through postal offices on the coast.
The brand was eventually named “Your slice of the Adriatic” and the visual representation basically contained multilingual wording, the sun and the sea. Croatia’s geographical outlines, that are well known among the visitors, had been extended with the outlines of Croatian sea borders, creating a new, lesser known, shape of this tourist destination. The usage of the word “slice” was later intensified on the products in line.
Since the “look and feel” of the products had to be unified, an icon world was created to provide the shoppers with a clue as to what was inside a somewhat colorful packaging, in case of doubt.
For better in-store promotion purposes, a display stand was designed as well. The larger ones contained car sun-shades, t-shirts, gift boxes, coffee mugs, wall calendars, language guide books and beach bags with UV radiation indicators.
The “runner” product was a combo gift box with a t-shirt, pen and key chain, as displayed on the pictures underneath. This picture also serves as an excellent example for the literal use of the brand name; when holding the box in your hands you experience an optical illusion of holding a ‘no-wall’ aquarium. The water refraction, the shadow of the “floating” brand logo and the precisely positioned goldfish enhance this effect from every angle.
The empty interior of the gift box featured a photo of the Adriatic coast and a shingle beach. We thought that the box could be used afterwards as a souvenir, keepsake or jewelry box.
The resin key chain contained the image of a goldfish, and the pen was attached to a virtual notepad, defining the ink color as “Adriatic Blue” in scribbled letters.
The coffee (or tea) mugs were personalized for over 60 cities and towns where the souvenirs were sold, always featuring the seaside scenery and a road sign pointing right to take the next exit into the preferred destination.
The packaging included another optical illusion, as if holding a cube of water that contains the submerged mug.
There were different T-shirt designs available. Some of them are shown beneath.
The shirts were rolled and packaged into yet another box with an optical illusion.
Well, the “submerging” spree led us to the car sunshades for the windshield, which again led to some very disturbing and inappropriate imagery 🙂 Since no one wishes to see the inside of their cars submerged in water with fish swimming around, we discarded that draft and went for “convertible on a sunny day” and after minor fixes and tweaks, that effect was achieved.
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The last product to design was a wall calendar featuring scenery from the Adriatic coast.
However, the clock was ticking and we still had no winning photos, and the project was to be done in two weeks. Luckily we had some help from a very talented amateur photographer whose work is now bringing smiles and nostalgic feelings to thousands of homes across the world.
Being a seasonal product, the wall calendars usually don’t make an interesting product to buy mid-summer, because it’s either six months too late or too soon. This specific product closed that gap; you’re looking at an 18 months calender (July 2011 – December 2012) that you can hang at home as soon as you return from your summer vacation.
