cibusphoto

When the design is someone else's

A graphic design studio in Palermo: identity, packaging, labels, publishing, type design. AIAP members. Since 2020 we have photographed the products they have worked on — wine, spirits, olive oil, honey, panettoni.

Project
Atelier790
Year
2020–2025
With
Graphic design, labels and packaging: Atelier790
When the design is someone else's

The brief

Photographs of the finished designs: labels and packaging once they have come off press and onto the product. They serve the studio's portfolio above all, which is how a piece of graphic design gets seen and judged once it is done. In some cases the commission comes from them but is meant for the end client — Fiasconaro, Tenute Rubino, Val Paradiso.

The constraint

A client who designs for a living looks at photographs like nobody else, and here the subject is not the product: it is the design. The image has to let you read the paper, the typeface, the relationship between the artwork and the curve of the bottle — and it has to do that without getting in the way. It is the hardest constraint there is, because a photographer's instinct is always to add: harder light, richer styling, one more idea. Here every extra idea covers someone else's. And the materials do not help: gold is a mirror and gives back whatever stands in front of it; a textured paper exists only when light crosses it at a grazing angle; a solid colour on rough stock shifts in tone with every degree of tilt.

How we solved it

Hard, directional light, angled to graze the surface rather than strike it head-on: that is what brings out the grain of the paper, and what keeps the gold alight in one place and legible everywhere else. The ground is chosen from inside the label's palette, never against it: two sheets of card meeting at a corner, a piece of lava rock, a length of driftwood. The shadow is not filled in, it is composed — often it is the second subject in the frame. The bottle is laid down when that is the only way to bring the label square to the lens without distorting it. And the frame closes in when the finish is the point, because some surfaces, in the hand, are understood by tilting the object against the light: in a still photograph that tilt has to be chosen once and for all. The rest is discipline. No props that ask for attention, no crop that sacrifices a letter, no retouching that corrects a colour the designer chose.

What we delivered

  • Product still life for every label and pack the studio designed
  • Close-up details, where the printed surface is the subject
  • Range shots, with a whole line in a single image
  • Images for the studio's own portfolio
  • Images commissioned through them for end clients: Fiasconaro, Tenute Rubino, Val Paradiso
  • Wine, spirits, olive oil, honey and baked goods: different categories, one method

Where the images ended up

  • The studio's portfolio
  • End clients' websites
  • Social
  • Nine Librandi bottles laid out on an ivory ground, each with its own label
  • Tenute Rubino Lamiro resting in the corner between a coral and a grey ground
  • Close-up of the Librandi Asyla label: ribbed textured paper and gold lettering

    The paper is ribbed and the gold is a mirror: the first exists only under grazing light, the second only when it finds something dark to reflect. Both have to hold in the same frame.

  • Pellegrino Tarì Nero d'Avola laid down on red and blue grounds with a white disc
  • Three bottles of Tabarani d'Angelo olive oil among stone blocks and driftwood
  • Val Paradiso Biancolilla olive oil amid vegetables and lemons arranged on a green ground
  • Librandi Le Passule laid down beside three small glasses of passito
  • A bottle of Insula Sicilian Gin on a white ground, with the sharp shadow of the glass
  • A jar of Terragurfa honey balanced on the edge of a white cube
  • Detail of the Librandi Labella label: gold rules and dots on white paper

    Gold on white is the hardest contrast there is: gold is as pale as the paper until it finds the angle that lights it.

More work

Back to work

Let's talk

Tell us what needs photographing

The more detail you give us, the more precise the quote: how many products, which channels the images are for, and when you need them. We reply within one working day.

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