Four iconic pasta designs to honour Italy

Italy has been a country linked to pasta for thousands of years. With this in mind, Elisava Alumni Eduardo del Fraile has paid a tribute to the country and its most characteristic food in one of his most recent works. The “Pasta Italiana” project puts this famous ingredient at the center, creating four different pasta designs that identify Italy: a Venetian gondola, a Bialetti coffee maker, a scooter and a carnival mask. The Italian company Menhir Salento will be in charge of manufacturing these four edible icons.

“We start the gastronomic experience with our eyes”, says del Fraile, who adds that, as a designer, there are similarities between working with pasta and other materials: “pasta is a malleable mass made up of various solid and liquid substances. There is a parallelism with ceramic, we have a mouldable mass that later solidifies”.

Product design, graphic design and creative freedom

For the designer, this work reflects “a connection between sculpture, a country, its gastronomy and the symbolic relationship it has with the world, perhaps from a more polyhedral view that does not conform to canons or stereotypes about what a designer should or not should do”. In the last 10 years, del Fraile has merged product design with graphic design in his studio. As he explains, “from the studio we work with a creative freedom that I think makes you freer, that is, you enjoy working more. Research leads you to paths to discover and new experiences where each day that passes is a new opportunity”.

Internationally recognized, his studio develops identity, packaging and product design projects for multiple companies, institutions and organizations. For years he has specialized in 360-degree product design, engaging in all stages of production and development from the gestation of the business model, and seeking a synergy between company, product and ecology.

Among his many projects, he has created beer and wine labels, designed an olive oil bottle, packaging boxes or a test tube-bottle for a brand of gin. Throughout all these years of intense work, del Fraile has won more than a hundred design awards around the world and a Laus of Honor for his career given by the ADG-FAD in 2013.