As part of a brand management project for Ritter Sport, we discovered that the brand lacked a unified illustration style. We managed to persuade Ritter Sport to develop a brand-appropriate style as part of a new Christmas edition.
There wasn’t one. We were working on a corporate design project — helping Ritter Sport understand their own brand better from the inside — when it became clear that illustration had no common ground. Every project had solved it again from scratch. The Christmas packaging was coming up, so we proposed developing a style first and letting the packaging be its first application. Marketing agreed to the longer route.
A single illustration style for the brand. The Ritter Sport bar is a square, so geometry was the obvious place to start: clear, simple, reduced to whatever makes each figure recognisable. The palette comes entirely from the product range, so the illustrations share a colour world with the bars rather than sitting next to one. For the first seasonal cast we skipped the usual Christmas inventory — a polar bear, penguins, a nutcracker with a squirrel for company. The style went into the brand guidelines and has been in use for the past seven years, this year’s Christmas range included.