The client
Pomì was founded in 1982 in the province of Parma and immediately became an icon thanks to its innovative packaging: the carton brick that makes it easy to recognize the tomato sauce in any country to which it is exported. Today, Pomì is a synonym for a controlled supply chain, Italian quality, tomato traceability, sustainability of the production and transformation processes.
The challenge
To improve the interaction on their Social Media platforms, I was tasked with developing a new look for Pomì's graphics, that should appear fresher, and more engaging, while keeping the identity of the iconic brand intact. Several considerations need to be made, regarding dealing with the limited space and attention spans of the audience within the overfilled social media market. The new designs needed to be impactful and stand out without appearing cluttered. An extra challenge lay like the content itself. While in the beginning, the channel was overflowing with recipe imagery, the new goal was to encourage interaction, by adding more informative content about the brand and the quality of its diverse products.
The re-designing process
After analyzing the different challenges of the task, the CEO and art director of QNY asked me to develop a range of graphics templates for the new Pomì-look. These templates were focused on the Instagram Story format (1920x1080), the traditional square format, and the portrait format (1350x1080). I was given the Pomi Brand guidelines, which included information regarding colorways, logos, and fonts. Later this guideline was transformed into an extra Social Media version, that included all new elements and size instructions.
Recognizable elements
I decided to go for the traditional Pomì red for most of the backgrounds for the explanatory graphics, icons, customer reviews, and announcements. The red color emphasized the white version of the logo and helped to create a recognizability throughout the graphics. Neutra Text was used as the only typeface for all content, while its fonts, bold, light, and medium were defined for its usage towards, copy, headlines, and subheads. Within this function, I had to ensure that all fonts, colors, icons, and logos remained consistent throughout all graphics.
Information graphics, sustainability & Pomi Harvest
To praise the full palette of Pomì's products, a range of square infeed graphics were designed that showed the packaging with the texture of its content. This way the viewer could identify the products and their qualities from each other more easily. In addition, I created graphics that showcased the ingredients of the sauce in numbers giving the quality of Pomì's tomatos a scientific touch. Behind-the-scenes topics like Pomì Harvest and the farmers that grow the tomatoes added to the establishment of trust between the consumer and the brand, as well as Amazon review stills. Slogans like "100% Natural Product of Italy" or "Owned by Italian farmers" were used to address the Italian identity of the brand and its goal towards sustainability. Reappearing elements like the red tomato, the red background, and the type reassured an overall look.
Recipe cards and recipe infeed graphics
While informative graphics were important to emphasize the quality of the products, it was crucial to remind of the actual usability process of Pomì while cooking with it. To reimagine the design of the recipe imagery, I introduced the organic bow window together with a clock for the preparation time. This way you could decide through the imagery and the preparation time whether the recipe was to your liking, without even reading the copy. In a sea of Instagram recipe graphics that mostly consist of sheer photographs, the new imagery could stand out while informing its viewer. For detailed instructions about the recipe, I developed a recipe story template, that related to the Infeed graphic in adapting the organic bow window and the icon. Here a special focus lay on the font size for the recipe cards, since I had to ensure readability on mobile devices.
Results
Throughout the development of the Social Media Design brand Identity for Pomi, I developed an understanding of the requirements for mobile-focused design, customer behavioral psychology within Social Media as well as the requirements of the platforms. I learned how to balance creativity with brand guidelines to maintain a cohesive visual representation while still capturing audience attention, how to tailor content to suit different audience preferences and engagement styles across platforms, and how to stay updated with ever-evolving design trends, including changes in platform algorithms, new features, and emerging visual styles.
Newsletter design
Later I adapted the elements of social media to the new Pomì newsletter, which was sent monthly. The goal of the newsletter design is to mirror the information graphics from the social media channels and the Pomì website. Elements like the red color and the organic bow window are recurring as well as the typeface.
