Black Milk

Design: Valeriy Sleba
Location: Russia
Project Type: Student Project
School: HSE Art and Design School
Tutor: Leonid Slavin
Packaging Contents: Milk
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Cardboard
Printing Process: Screen printing

My project is called Black Milk. It was created during the workshop with our curator, and the task was to combine music style or musician with packaging design in order to create strong visual brand tone.

This oxymoronic naming was used because of the genre of black metal, which is or was quite popular music genre, particularly in Scandinavia. In this project I pictured the pattern on the cow’s fur as black metal musicians’ makeup, or as it is also called “corpse paint”.

Many people claim that this reminds them famous glam-rock band ‘Kiss’, but their makeup is more soft and ‘bright’, so to say. That is why well-known rounded cow spots are strictly sharp there, to give them frightening vibe of black metal, which is really dark music genre, to be honest.

I designed the packaging for three Stock Keeping Units, two of them differ by fat percentage and flavours, and one of them if for kids. The strange naming of flavours depicts the philosophy of black metal musicians, which they sing (mostly, scream) in their lyrics. I did not intend to play by the rules of the market, working on this project, but this concept may be the alternative milk packaging in stores. Technically, it is the simple cardboard boxes with screen printing on it. This technique and materials were chosen because of its eco-friendly characteristics and biodegradability.

Personally, I was inspired by such black metal bands and musicians as Immortal, Deadlife, Darkthrone, Burzum and its famously and notoriously known leader Varg Vikernes.

What’s Unique?
I think, the idea of depicting cow’s spots as a makeup of black metal musicians.