The making of Keramikus kitchen knives
Analyzing the existing solutions.
The first drafts.
Searching for an interesting concept for handle geometry.
Manually carving a wide range of handle prototypes and gradually achieving the shape we like.
Creating a test render and determining handle and blade sizes.
Making a number of working prototypes for testing at the studio’s café and giving them to our chefs. Listening to the comments and improving the shape accordingly.
Correcting the first pre-production samples.
Considering our options for logo placement and design.
The second batch of pre-production samples comes in.
Starting to work on the packaging. The first ideas.
Creating a number of prototypes of the packaging lodgement. Adjusting the shape and positioning, correcting the color.
Experimenting with different solutions, moving around the elements of the logo and knife names.
Achieving the golden mean and getting back to grinding the details and positions of key elements.
The artistic director does not like the knife names Large, Medium and Small. We need each knife to have a personality. Approaching the editor and the copywriter and thinking à trois.
Copywriter: Maybe something not related to the sizes? Just images? Shefus, povarus, kulinarus?
Editor: Packaging would be great, too. I remember there was something about the purpose of each knife, we can use that. Large is what they call a chef’s knife, so if we follow this pattern it can be Keramikus Shefus.
Copywriter: I’ve looked at the types of kitchen knives and it looks like they are a chef’s (universal) knife, a meat knife and a vegetable knife. Fruktus-Ovoschus. Or maybe, Vegetus? As in vegetarian? It includes both fruit and vegetables.
Altogether: the large one is Chefus, the medium one is Usubus and the smaller one is Vegetus.
Designer: What do you think?
Artistic director: ОК.
Tidying up all the small things.
Finding a number of inaccuracies in the text. Inches, decimal mark. In some instances we have to retype the text over again, at which point the designer loses a cup of coffee to the artistic director in a bet.
Giving the layouts to the editor and the translator for proofreading.
Translator: This is an old issue of style. Comma is European, dot is American (below is an excerpt from The Chicago Manual of Style.)
Translator: We need to put dots instead of commas in every decimal we use. Also I can’t see what symbol we use for inches, it should be double prime.
Artistic director: We’re a European company. Let this peculiarity win us some charm in America.
Translator: Usubus. Initially this knife was called a bread knife, but with no serration it can’t be used for cutting bread.
We are tasked with re-taking all the pictures. Going to the store, shopping, photo shooting all the ingredients and finally establishing the purpose of each knife.
Redrawing the hand.
Putting together the very best products.
Designer: We have two concepts for each of the boxes (left and right). On the left the food is cut in half, on the right the same thing is sliced. Which one will make the cut?
Artistic director: The sliced one is better.
Assembling four full mock-ups and sending another trial batch for production.
The batch comes in, we are having a close look and make final adjustments to the composition of food on the packaging for a set of three, correcting the colors. Once again sending to the editors and finally submitting to production.
