Project
Tinta
Identity
Packaging
Labels
2025
The brief
Tinta is Carolina and Miguel Abreu, who mix fountain-pen inks in a former pharmacy lab in Coimbra and sell about 14,000 bottles a year, mostly to pen shops in Portugal, Spain and Japan. Their bottles came in a printed box with the colour named in small type, so a shop couldn’t tell one ink from another on the shelf without opening every box. With six new inks due in autumn 2025, they wanted bottles a shop could sell from across the counter.
The idea
Each Tinta ink is named after a Portuguese river, matched to its water, from the teal of the Mondego at Coimbra to the rust of the Sado’s mud flats. So the label is mostly the ink itself, a swatch printed from a scan of the colour dried on paper, above the river’s name. Lined up, the bottles read as a colour chart, and the box carries all six inks round its waist, so the range shows even when one colour is sold out.
Bottles
A 50 ml square bottle with a black cap and a label that is mostly swatch. The colour is printed from a scan of the ink dried on cotton paper, so it matches what comes out of the pen rather than the liquid in the glass.
Swatches
A swatch card goes into every order and onto every shop counter, brushed by hand in the lab from the batch it ships with.
Boxes
Cream board boxes printed in black and the six inks, with the range as a band round the middle, so a shop that has sold out of one colour still shows all six.
Samples
Vials of 4 ml in a wooden tray for pen shops and in a kraft envelope for customers, at €2 each, so a buyer can try a river before buying the bottle.
What changed
The new bottles reached shops in October 2025 along with the six new inks. Shops now line them up on the counter as a colour chart, and two pen shops in Tokyo asked for the swatch cards on their own, to hand out with every pen they sell.
Credits
Okapi: Beatriz Correia (lead designer), Ana Pires (packaging), Marta Lobo (copy)
Tinta: Carolina Abreu (founder and ink maker), Miguel Abreu (sales)
With: labels and boxes printed in Coimbra; photography by Rafael Costa
