On April 9, 2026, Happycentro Design Studio — Verona's long-running illustration-first design house — published I AM ITALIANO, a packaging identity for Sabadì's premium chocolate collection.
The system
The central idea is a category-breaking packaging move: every chocolate bar's wrapper doubles as a collectible postcard, organized around Italian cultural themes. Art, destinations, and iconic symbols of Italian identity each get their own series. The wrapper is no longer disposable; it's the souvenir.
The illustration system (Andrea Rubele, Mattia Cristini, Federico Galvani) is deliberately varied — some bars use high-contrast vector work, others use painterly renderings, others use typographic compositions with custom letterforms by Mattia Cristini. This variation serves the collectible premise: each postcard has its own character rather than enforcing a visual consistency that would kill the surprise of discovering a new series.
The brand wordmark ties it all together with a custom serif that reads as museum-catalog rather than confectionery-aisle.
Why it works
Premium chocolate is a saturated category where every brand claims "artisanal" with near-identical packaging vocabularies: kraft paper, minimal gold foil, a typographic wordmark. I AM ITALIANO walked around the consensus by treating the wrapper as a content surface rather than a product surface. The collectible mechanism turns a one-time purchase into a series-collection impulse.
Credits
- Studio: Happycentro, Verona, Italy
- Art Direction: Federico Galvani
- Illustration: Andrea Rubele, Mattia Cristini, Federico Galvani
- Graphic Design: Andrea Rubele
- Type Design: Mattia Cristini
- Photography: Federico Galvani
- Client: Sabadì
- Published: 2026-04-09
- Source: Behance
