Drinks · packaging
2024
El Secreto
El Secreto is a herbal liqueur brand built on a story: a recipe kept for generations by monks, accessible only with the right key.
The scope covered the brand identity and its packaging, carried through to final render: art direction, label and bottle design, and the 3D production of the whole series in Cinema 4D and Photoshop.
El Secreto
A recipe kept under lock and key.
Drinks · packaging
2024
The scope covered the brand identity and its packaging, carried through to final render: art direction, label and bottle design, and the 3D production of the whole series in Cinema 4D and Photoshop.
Challenge
The challenge was translating that imagery — mysticism and monastic craft — into a credible identity and packaging without slipping into medieval costume.
Strategy
The strategy was to take the name seriously: if the brand is called El Secreto — the secret — the whole system had to behave like one. Every decision — the emblem, the closure, the texture — was conceived as one more layer between the drinker and the recipe.
The reference wasn't supermarket liqueur but the apothecary and the scriptorium: objects made slowly, labelled by hand, kept under lock and key.
Identity
The whole system keeps the same secret — the key, the wax, the parchment.
The identity speaks in blackletter: a typeface that carries centuries without having to explain them. The emblem is an antique key — the only way to reach the recipe — and the rest of the system escorts it: parchment, earth tones, the graphic vocabulary of a guarded document.
System
The packaging takes the story into the object: dark apothecary glass, embossed reliefs on the bottle and wax seals that turn every opening into a small ceremony.
The whole series was modelled and rendered in Cinema 4D, with post-production in Photoshop: 3D made it possible to decide material, light and atmosphere before a single physical bottle exists.
Applications
The final series — nine product renders — covers bottle, label, seals and atmospheric still lifes: the complete kit with which a liqueur brand introduces itself to the world.
Outcome
The result is a series of nine product renders presenting the complete brand — bottle, label, seal and atmosphere — with the consistency of a photo shoot that hasn't needed to happen yet. The project is published on Behance.