Featured image for Don't You Always Need A Little Mo?

Don't You Always Need A Little Mo?

by Casha Doemland on 03/14/2019 | 3 Minute Read

Managing a sweet tooth is a difficult task, especially with the sheer amount of options on the market for you to choose from. You've got cookies, brownies, cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, creme brulee, donuts, chocolate, candy and pie—you know, everything that makes life worth living.

So if the run of the mill trip to the grocery store is fraught with indecision, it helps when you can find a brand as intriguing and eye-catching as Mo?. Made with all natural ingredients and no additional additives, you’ll likely toss a few pints in your grocery cart and vote to give this brand a try as you ask yourself, "Will I too be wanting mo' of it?".

To figure out why the Ukranian-based design agency, Spiilka chose to have us asking for mo’, we spoke with co-founders and designers Anastasiia Zherebetska and Vladimir Smirnov.


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What’s the inspiration behind the name?

Anastasiia Zherebetska: MO are the first two letters of the word MOROZYVO, which is translated as ice-cream in Ukrainian. The story behind the creative idea is as minimalistic as these two letters. We wanted to empathize that Mo doesn’t contain any excessive features: it is tasty without any useless additives. The problem was that Mo didn’t have any emotional perks yet, so we put a question mark to turn the name into an invitation to taste this yumminess.

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Why was one of the biggest goals to create minimalistic packaging?  

Vladimir Smirnov: Our main principles in design are consistency and distinctiveness. It means that brand identity must reflect the product’s distinguishing qualities and stay balanced in terms of a visual system. These principles always help us to make not only aesthetically pleasant design but also engineering-ly right. The challenge, in this case, was to find the right emotion. Not too expressive, but with a twist in it.

Our goal was to represent the big idea of Mo by means of packaging, too. We wanted our customers to sense this idea from first sight.

Mo is all about good old basics—it’s tasty, it’s healthy, and it’s damn good.

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Why did you opt to change the logotype for standalone, sorbets and ice-creams?  

Anastasiia Zherebetska:  An issue we had was differentiating sorbets and ice-creams from one another while maintaining a minimalistic design – no additional typography, explanations or visual elements. So we decided to put milky white logos on ice-cream packages and empty, non-milky, stroked ones on sorbets.

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Which flavor of ice cream or sorbet is your favorite and why?

Vladimir Smirnov: The majority of Spiilka votes for the Mango sorbet. It tastes like actual mango, but way cooler.