Sweet Design: a Passion for Chocolate

02-03-2017 00:40

Being based in Switzerland, it is very hard not to talk about chocolate but, as designers, we would like to talk about it from another perspective.
Everybody knows that chocolate is a real feel-good product and, according to the latest studies, a bar of dark chocolate a day can keep stress at bay.
But did you know that chocolate has a lot to do with design? Did you ever notice that its form that can change its flavor?

Usually the taste of a food changes if you change the ingredients, but when it comes to chocolate, shape and texture can affect the flavor too.
If someone asked you to explain the difference between a Toblerone and a Kit-Kat you might default to listing ingredients, but actually these items are set apart by their own distinct textures and shapes.

Chocolate can be moulded it into an amazing range of shapes and sizes, in a way it represents a designer’s dream product.
In the last years some world famous designers such as Karim Rashid and Nendo, have been exploring the world of chocolate, not only to design luxury chocolate shops but also to give shape to fabulous chocolate creations.

Oki Sato, chief designer and founder of Nendo, recently created ChocolaTexture,  a geometrically advanced series of chocolates to illustrate how shape and texture influence taste.
He followed up on the idea with ChocolaTextureBar, a single bar of chocolate with a surface divided into 12 faces, each with diverse three-dimensional patterns that create the textures: stripes, dots, zigzags, checkered patterns and wave patterns. Chocolates with the same raw materials are perceived as different, as distinctive textures affect the perception of taste.

If you want to see some other amazing examples of chocolate art creations, just take a look at Chocolate stories, our dedicated board on Pinterest.
These striking chocolates invite us to consider the formal qualities of some famous treats and to look at them from another point of view.

The design of a Toblerone, the iconic Swiss chocolate, with its triangular shape is conceived to offer a different experience from that of a Kit-Kat, designed to be broken apart and consumed one finger at a time; the Mars’ shape, solid and straightforward has nothing in common with that of the Crunch bar, essentially a big, thin sheet of chocolate to nibble.
In Switzerland top quality chocolate shops like Läderach have a counter in which they display handmade chocolate barks of various flavors that you can purchase in individual pieces; the glass case are also filled with rows and rows of beautifully designed pralines and exquisite truffles of various size and shape.

Each form offers an experience, each experience has a unicity.
In a way this has a lot to do with design.
And good design, just like chocolate, can simply make you feel better.

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