Based in the Tuscan village of Cascine di Buti in central Italy, Simone Baldocchi is a graphic designer, photographer and illustrator who works mainly with small businesses. ‘Blush is a beauty boutique that offers treatments and beauty products,’ he explains. ‘The owner needed paper bags for her gift vouchers, something like an envelope, but more sophisticated.’
Baldocchi’s solution was to design a wide range of concepts for the paper bags, with Blush selecting the three versions it preferred. ‘I try to create different formats of paper bags for each project and I like to offer different layouts,’ he says. ‘That’s something my clients appreciate. They are free to pick three different proposals, with different colours, backgrounds, proportions, and to print from ten to 50 copies, as they like.’
For the client, the benefit is that they can easily vary the look of their gift vouchers as they are distributed to customers. To make the bags, Baldocchi created proposals showing options for the layout and dimensions, before working up a digital template to figure out how to fold, cut and glue the A3 sheets of Woodstock Betulla paper. These were then printed on an inkjet printer.
‘After that, I just had to finish the bags, one by one, by hand,’ he says. ‘To close them, I added a piece of grosgrain ribbon to give a tailored touch.’
Paper: Woodstock Betulla