Namma Bowl

• Three new crafts at once

  Container, packaging and label design were all new to me. Each one brings its own rules: materials, print, legal text and how a jar reads on a shelf.

• Keep the cooking

  The product had to save time without turning into a ready meal. Customers still cook, so the packaging had to promise help, not a shortcut.

• Handmade, and trusted

  A small home brand has to look careful and safe to buy from while still feeling homemade.

• Explain cooking on a screen

  The website had to show how a jar becomes dinner in seconds, in German and English, for people who may never have cooked a curry.

1. Which part of making curry is the hard part, and which part do people want to keep?
2. What container shows off the sauce and still feels like it came from a family kitchen?
3. How do three flavours look like one family on a shelf and still stay easy to tell apart?
4. How little does the website need to say before someone understands how to cook with a jar?

We started with the food itself: what goes into a curry, which steps take the longest and which ones people enjoy. I explored formats, names and visual directions in Figma before committing to anything.

The single-line bowl mark and the flavour palette that every later piece draws on.

The idea that held up was to package curry as modules. A jar carries the slow-cooked sauce base, a pre-measured spice blend and a marination blend. The customer brings the protein (chicken, paneer or tofu) and the stove. Dinner takes three steps and 15 to 30 minutes, and it still feels like cooking.

Protein, base, pot: the three steps the whole product is built around.

A straight-sided clear glass jar lets the sauce colour do the selling: green for Green Goddess, orange for Royal Butter, deep red for Smoky Tikka. The lid hides under a square of crumpled kraft paper tied with natural twine, so every jar looks wrapped by hand.

The three launch films side by side, each jar bursting into its own ingredients.

The front label is a white card with a stacked logo, HANDMADE in the flavour colour, a bold flavour name and one hand-drawn ingredient. Faint line drawings of ingredients frame the edges. The back label explains the product in one sentence, adds four simple claims and puts the recipe QR where you hold the jar. A recipe card under the twine promises fresh ingredients, bold flavours and simpler cooking.

The back label puts the recipe QR where you hold the jar; the recipe card rides under the twine.

nammabowl.ch tells the product story as you scroll. Tomatoes, onions, cashews and spices fall through warm orange space, fill an empty jar and become a finished Royal Butter jar. Product pages say what is inside, how much it serves and how long it takes, then show the three cooking steps as simple drawings. The site is German first, with an English toggle, and set in Inter Tight on warm paper white.

A product page on desktop, and the home page and a product page on a phone.

Jar, label, card, social posts and site share one system: a single-line bowl mark, near-black type, one saturated colour per flavour and fresh ingredients around the jar. A shopper can follow the same jar from an Instagram post to the product page to the kitchen counter.

From loose ingredients to a finished jar, one system throughout.

• Learn the craft on the job. Years of digital design helped me less with paper, glass and print than with the system thinking that ties them together.
• Find the idea first. Once curry was modular, the jar, the labels and the website each had one clear job.
• Keep one test. Working with my wife as the client tied every decision to one question: does this make her recipes easier to cook at home?