Stellaria

Stellaria: a little piece of the universe, handmade

Brand identity for an artisanal chocolate and alfajor brand · Graphic Production, Escuela Da Vinci · Buenos Aires, 2026

Stellaria is a fictional premium sweets brand I developed for my Graphic Production course. The brief was to build a complete identity, from the first concept to a visual system that could hold up across packaging, photography and merchandise. The brand makes chocolates, preserves and alfajores, Argentina’s classic sandwich cookie, and sits in the same space as local premium names like Havanna or Cachafaz.

Starting from somewhere else

Instead of starting from the product, I started from a world that has nothing to do with food: the cosmic and metaphysical imagery of tarot cards and Art Nouveau. The idea was to borrow that symbolic language (suns, moons, stars, arcana) and bring it down to something small and everyday, like a bite of an alfajor. The contrast between that solemn imagery and the warmth of handmade food became the core of the brand.

A second root came in later, closer to home. The radiant sun of Andean tradition, which also appears on Argentina’s flag, added a Latin American layer. It connects the cosmic idea to the earthly origin of the ingredients: cacao, sugar, dulce de leche.

The name

Stellaria comes from the Latin stella (star) plus -aria (relating to). It’s also the botanical name of the starworts, a family of plants whose flowers open into five points. That double reading worked for me: a name that points to the sky and to something alive that grows from the ground.

Along the way I also explored Apogeum and Cenit (zenith), and ruled out names like Stellarium and Stellaris because they already belong to a planetarium app and a video game.

Finding the visual language

The first type explorations were all-caps, with radiating suns over the “i”. They felt too rigid. The direction I was after was lighter: something ethereal and organic, closer to handwriting than to a heavy display face.

That’s where the logotype found its shape. The “S” became a crescent moon holding a six-pointed star, and the “i” is crowned with a smaller moon. From there, the symbol came almost naturally: the “S” on its own, with a small crescent added. It works as a signature on small pieces, on the wrappers, and as the base module for the patterns.

One color per flavor

The palette is built around the four alfajor flavors. Each one gets its own color: chocolate, dulce de leche, midnight blue for the cookie flavor, and pistachio. The two warm tones carry the logotype in positive and negative. The blue and green work as accents, mostly in photography.

A set of patterns (stars, the symbol, sun and moon) gives the system texture without competing with the logotype.

A character to tell the story

After a round of feedback from my instructor, I added a character to present each product: a little elf in a wizard’s hat who lives in Stellaria’s sky. Each flavor has its own scene. He sits on a bitten moon, hangs from a shooting star, spots a cookie through a telescope, or falls asleep on the sun.

The character made the packaging warmer and gave the brand a way to speak without words.

Packaging

I developed two wrapper systems. In the first, a shooting-star trail splits the wrapper between the star pattern and the flavor color. The second uses an orbital frame inspired by tarot cards, with the character at the center like an arcanum.

Opening the system

To test how far the identity could go, I took it into photography and physical space. The four wrappers sit on a mirrored salt flat under the Milky Way. A duotone photo series in chocolate and dulce de leche brings together sky, land and craft: the night landscape, hands shaping dough, cacao beans. That series scales up into a mural for the store. Last, a line of T-shirts uses the symbol at large scale and the character’s arcana inside the orbital frame.

Closing

Stellaria starts from an abstract idea, the cosmos we carry inside, and tries to make it tangible: an “S” that is a moon, four flavors with their own color, and a character who lives among them. The system stands on a few elements and expands without losing its voice, always softly spoken and warm.

The full presentation is available as a PDF below.

Credits
Design: Martín Malandra
Instructor: Inés Soledad Viqueira
Course: Graphic Production, Escuela Da Vinci, 2026