Vidro is a glassworks in Riga that makes three containers: a 120 ml spice jar, a 370 ml jar and a 500 ml bottle. Its customers are small food makers, from beekeepers and dairies to an olive oil importer, who buy by the pallet and put their own labels on. My job was to give the glass a name without getting in the way of theirs.

A name in the glass, not on it

Nothing on a Vidro container is printed. The name is moulded into the shoulder, small enough to ignore and easy to find when you look for it, so a customer’s label never has to work around it.

Moulded type has rules that print doesn’t: no hairlines, open shapes inside the letters, and corners soft enough to leave the mould cleanly. I drew a separate version of the wordmark just for glass and checked it on sample bottles from a trial mould.

A catalogue lit by the glass

The catalogue photographs every container in daylight on a coloured ground, filled and empty, so the glass throws its own light across the page. Honey on lemon yellow, paprika on orange, olive oil on cobalt. A buyer sees what the glass does to their product before ordering a sample.

Each spread gives the facts a buyer asks for:

• Capacity to the brim and to the fill line.

• Empty weight, to the gram.

• Neck size and the lids that fit it.

• How many come on a pallet.

From the conveyor to the shelf

We also photographed new jars cooling on the conveyor in the glassworks, because buyers wanted to see where their glass is made. Those pictures open the catalogue.

The last spread is the whole range on one white shelf against a blue wall. Buyers now order by the number on the page, 370 or 500, instead of describing a jar over the phone, which was most of the point.