Conde Tovar | Spiced Rum

It always seemed to me that I knew history and geography well. As a child, I was curious: I could list countries by size and location from memory and easily name the capital of any country. Fifteen years ago, when I worked as a designer for a German IT company and frequently traveled to Germany, I was convinced I understood Germans almost completely.

That’s why I was so surprised when I received a letter from a German man living deep in the tropical forests of Venezuela. It turned out that Venezuela has a town called Colonia Tovar, founded in the 19th century by settlers from the Schwarzwald region. The letter was from José, who wrote about the need to create a label for a rum produced in this town.

According to the brief, the label had to be divided diagonally: one side representing Venezuela, the other the Schwarzwald. During our conversations, we came up with an idea that went beyond geography — we wanted to add emotion. We decided to portray a couple separated by a great distance: a man on one side thinking about his beloved, and a woman on the opposite side gazing toward the horizon, waiting for a ship carrying a letter from him. This visual division also had symbolic meaning, as the rum was made in Venezuela but matured in Germany. The product itself traveled the same path as our imagined story.