When in Italy, we always enjoy high quality of food products there. This time we were amazed by nice packagings of the Italian butters.

Three butters, three companies and three very nice graphic and packaging solutions. Soligo, Prealpi and Asolo are among others one of the most favorite Italian producers of butter. Products of these traditional companies (Soligo was founded in 1883 and Prealpi in 1922) you can buy in every grocery shop or supermarket. Design of their packaging is based on the long time tradition of the companies and is very natural part of the whole product.

Some more from our recent trip to Venice and Ljubljana this week!

Forest still provides a lot of food for contemporary society too. One of the best treasures of the nature is honey. In our Wood Style blog we were looking around the world for some interesting honey producers and their products. In this small survey we are not interesting in the honey itself, but in the quality and style of the packaging and graphic design of the products.

According to our research we present here two groups with two different approaches for graphic design and packaging.

The first row above presents some more traditional, as well as newer producers whose approach to packaging and design is more intuitive and ordinary. Despite this we find these products relatively nice with the ordinary but clever visual and functional results based on the honey character.

In the second row you can see three examples of the more progressive contemporary approach to design of the packaging. For example Heide honey was made for Heide Museum of Modern Art in Australia by design agency Pidgeon. The design is based on the use of Hex typeface, which was inspired by the honeycombs. The another, more minimalist result we can see in the elegant packaging design of Beeline honey produced in Chicago, USA.

It is quite out of date, but these pictures fit exactly into our Wood Style blog. Super Natural was a project by London-based interior stylist and designer Faye Toogood presenting it at the London design week in September last year.

Toogood is interested in very specific design works very much. She composes, curates and creates whole environments with really various themes. "Super Natural in London was dedicated to foraging, collecting and observing in the English countryside.", as she says.

In her pop-up space in west London she was presenting her first collection of furniture called Assemblage 1, as well as Brambles café and this spectacular installation of mushrooms picked by New Forest forager Mrs. Tee.

Widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost authority on edible wild mushrooms, Brigitte Tee has been supplying wild and cultivated fungi to the country’s leading chefs from her base in Lymington, Hampshire, for more than 35 years. Backed by unrivalled knowledge and expertise, Mrs Tee is the only licence holder entitled to pick and sell the many diverse wild mushrooms that grow in the New Forest where she is based, offering chefs a selection of unique, quality, seasonal produce, including the highly regarded and sought-after New Forest Cep.

In collaboration with the designer, Mrs. Tee presented some wild mushrooms species in the natural installation with magnifying glasses for the best discovering all the details of the forest treasures. Whole installation was the fascinated introduction into the world of English forest as well as art of the mushrooms and fascinated atmosphere of the work of Faye Toogood who achieves to create very emotional spaces.

Everybody who is interested in contemporary design, should know this ice cream cone made of porcelain which was designed by young Delphine Frey in 2007. Frey designed this conceptual piece at the ECAL university, which was collaborating with traditional French manufacture Bernardaud in those days.

But who invented original ice cream cone? The answer is Italo Marchioni. New Yorker was selling ice cream in waffle cones since 1896. On December 13, 1903, he received U.S. patent No. 746971 for a mold for making pastry cups to hold ice cream. The cones are mentioned in some cooking books from France and Great Britain before him too. Geniality of the simple food design received many symbolical honors. One of them is presentation at the MOMA design collection.

For the bottle logos of the Vinarija Kos in Donja Zelina in Croatia, studio Cuculi´c from Zagreb received Red Dot award for Communication design in 2009.

The text from Red Dot:

The series of five wine labels consists of a logo in the shape of a stylised blackbird and an elegant typeface in differently coloured, discreetly shiny capital letters. Each label presents the bird in a different pose, creating the impression of a dynamic brand identity that is animated in a certain way. At the same time, the labels incorporate the playfulness of the blackbird, which is reflected in the bird stealing a letter from the name of each wine.

We love pasta. It is a classic meal of an italian road cycling also. At the Tour de France, for example, the pasta is a important light and very energetic meal, which prepare cycling team`s chefs.

So when we saw in one little shop in Rome this great selection of classic Faella pasta, we had to buy some packages. Pastificio Faella was established in 1907 by Gaetano Faella in Gragnano close to Naples. Today, Faella is one of the best producer of various types of pasta, which company sells in very nice old-fashioned packages. Great food for the great cycling trip. Some receipts on OKOLO coming in the future.