---
title: Pelican Negru. From a single line · Design Academy
url: https://rt.md/en/academia/pelican-negru/
description: A logo redesign for Moldova’s only biodynamic wine: the pelican becomes a signature - one line, one weight. Bonus: a label system built on feathers. A full case study, from analysis to mockups.
alternate: RO: https://rt.md/academia/pelican-negru/
source: RT Design Studio, https://rt.md (contact: mail@rt.md)
---

[← Design Academy](https://rt.md/en/academia/)
Case study · Logo & Label · August 2026 · 7 min read

# Pelican Negru. From a single line.

The study

We redraw the logo of Moldova’s only biodynamic wine - and, as a bonus, its label system. An exercise in the spirit of the Academy: not a critique, but a look at whether another approach exists.

[Citește studiul în română →](https://rt.md/academia/pelican-negru/)

![The Pelican Negru family - the redesign proposal](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/01-cover.jpg)

## A golden story, told in a whisper

[Pelican Negru](https://pelicannegru.wine) is a brand with a story few wineries can tell. It was founded in 1999 in Olănești, in the Purcari area, by a French-Moldovan duo: Nicolas Dirand, an Alsatian winemaker, and [Gheorghe Arpentin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Arpentin) - president of the Union of Oenologists of Moldova and the first Moldovan ever elected to the governing bodies of the OIV, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. Devoted to biodynamics since the 1990s, Arpentin makes Moldova’s only biodynamic wine here, on 25 hectares of clay-limestone chernozem on the banks of the Dniester. His personal wine. His signature wine.

![The current Pelican Negru Silk bottle, in the vineyard](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/actual-silk.jpg)

The current identity: the Silk Red Blend label, in the Olănești vineyards.

The name has a rare hook too: the black pelican does not exist in nature (pelican negru is Romanian for “black pelican”). It is a beautiful paradox - but one with a graphic condition attached: if the bird in the logo is not unmistakably a pelican, the whole game is lost.

![The current logo, annotated: inconsistent elements and the uneven baselines of the wordmark](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/analiza-logo.png)

Under the magnifying glass: elements that never repeat, different weights, sharp terminals - and, in the wordmark, letters at three heights.

## What we set out to solve

To be clear: the bird reads - the pelican is there, with its pouch and raised wings. The problem is the execution. The silhouette gathers **a great many elements that never repeat one another**  - fine hatching in the wing, a solid body, thin, sharp terminals at almost every end - each at a different weight. Without repetition there is no consistency; at small sizes the details drown and the silhouette turns into a smudge on the bottle’s capsule.

- The “pEliCAN NEgRU” wordmark mixes lowercase, small caps and enlarged capitals - three different heights in the same word, a convention of the 2000s;
- the classic label range is clean but generic: a frame with an arch, everything centred - it could belong to any winery in the region;
- the Exclusive range breaks the system entirely: painting labels, each bottle a different world, and the pelican gone from the front.

![The current Exclusive range - the painted Velvet label](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/exclusive-velvet.jpg)

![The current Exclusive range - the painted Mamonth label](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/exclusive-mamonth.jpg)

![The current Exclusive range - La cuvée Master](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/exclusive-master.jpg)

Today’s Exclusive range: a painting across the whole front, a different visual code per bottle. The brand fragments.

And one detail that says a lot: the range names - Silk, Velvet, Soft, Lace - are an excellent idea, a whole system of textures. Visually, completely unused. Nothing silky on Silk, nothing velvety on Velvet.

## First attempt: geometry

The first redesign went straight at what bothered us: consistent shapes, close weights, construction on a grid. The result was a solid symbol, with lock-up variants, a round badge, even merch mockups.

![The first logo version - the geometric direction, lock-up variants](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/v1-lockups.png)

Version 1: the geometric symbol, lock-ups, badge, construction grid.

![Version 1 - logo etched on a glass, mockup](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/v1-mock-pahar.jpg)

![Version 1 - the badge on T-shirts, mockup](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/v1-mock-tricouri.jpg)

![Version 1 on the bottle, side by side with the current label](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/v1-sticle.jpg)

Version 1 in context: the proposal on the bottle, side by side with the current label.

![The labels of the first version, with a script signature](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/v1-etichete.png)

The v1 labels: the texture name written as a script signature, the geometric symbol on top.

And yet we stopped it. The geometry had erased exactly the features that make a pelican a pelican - what remained read as a wing, a feather, anything. The temperature was wrong: cold geometry plus letterspaced caps = fintech, not biodynamic wine. And on the label, the warm script signature and the mechanical symbol lived in two different worlds.

The lesson

Better execution is not a reason to rebrand. To be worth even proposing, a new identity has to be considerably better - otherwise you swap one for another and burn years of recognition for a gain nobody sees.

It is the same lesson as in [Basconslux, part 1](https://rt.md/en/academia/basconslux-1/): we executed well and discovered that good execution is not enough.

## The idea: the signature

The answer came from the story, not from geometry. If Pelican Negru is the signature wine of Moldova’s most decorated oenologist - then the pelican **is**  the signature. A bird drawn the way you sign your name: in a single stroke of the pen, without lifting the nib from the paper.

![One-line sketches - iterations of the pelican drawn from a single line](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/schite-oneline.png)

Some of the sketches: the same pelican, different beak angles, different loops, a different gesture.

We drew dozens of variants and chose the one that met two criteria:

- **it looks most like a signature**  - the loop at the head is exactly the gesture of a signature;
- **it keeps the original angle** : the raised wing and the beak pointing up and to the right, at the same visual angle as the current logo. The market has memorised that gesture for years - we change the hand that draws it, not the gesture.

![The current logo and the new proposal, side by side](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/vechi-vs-nou.png)

Old and new: the same angle, the same direction of flight - a different hand. Evolution, not revolution.

## One line, one weight

The symbol is calibrated to the same stroke weight as the typeface in the wordmark - symbol and letters look written with the same pressure of the nib. The exact antithesis of the old logo: a single line, a single weight, no sharp points.

![The lock-up variants of the new logo](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/lockups-noi.png)

Lock-ups: horizontal, vertical, with and without the year, reversed, with the construction grid.

## Bonus: the label that signs itself

We first tried the classic route - an elegant serif, a centred composition, a wavy line whose number of waves encoded the number of grape varieties in the blend. The serif (Cormorant) was no accident: it keeps the play of the original logo - capitals mixed with lowercase - but in a logical order. P and N are large, and the remaining letters, even though they mix uppercase and lowercase forms, all sit at the same height:

![The intermediate label direction, set in Cormorant](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/etichete-cormorant.png)

The intermediate direction: warm and correct - but well-behaved. It lacked the memorable element.

This is where it helps that we have been customers for years. More than once, on [an evening out with friends](https://boysnight.club), we ordered Pelican Negru and saw the problem first-hand: on the wine-shop shelf, Silk, Soft and Velvet were hard to tell apart - the wine’s name sat small, lumped in with “red blend”, on three otherwise identical labels. And when we asked for “that Pelican with three varieties”, the label was no help either: the blend was a single line of small type. We would look at each other: which one was it?

The decisions on the new label come straight from there. We flipped the hierarchy: the wine’s name sits at the top, large, as the hero - **so you can spot it from a shelf away**  - because on the shelf it is the variant that sets a bottle apart. The brand moves down to the bottom, **where a document is signed** : “Pelican Negru” plus the signature pelican, exactly in the corner where an author signs their work.

And the surprise element: **the feather** . You do not expect a photographic feather on a wine label - it draws the eye and stays in the memory. But the feather is not just spectacle; it is the concept closing in on itself: pelican → the pelican’s feather → the quill that writes the signature → the signature in the corner. And the black pelican, which does not exist in nature, exists here through its only plausible trace: a black feather.

- number of feathers = number of varieties in the blend: Soft and Velvet two each, Silk three - so next time someone asks for “the one with three varieties”, the label answers for itself;
- the texture name in a serif (Cormorant) - the sensory voice; the information in a geometric sans - the technical voice;
- Lace, the only white, gets silver feathers and a gold title - the same scheme, a different register.

![Dozens of label iterations from the process, from classic frames to the feather system](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/etichete-studiu.jpg)

Dozens of attempts: frames, tabs, vintages, wavy lines, script, feathers. A system is searched for before it is found.

![The four final labels - Soft, Silk, Velvet, Lace](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/etichete-finale.png)

The final system: Soft, Silk, Velvet, Lace. One scheme, four characters.

Where does this place us in wine-label theory? The feather is a textbook case of moderate incongruity: you do not expect it on a wine shelf, but it decodes in a second - and that exact combination, research shows, captures attention and stays in memory. The metaphor resolves in the name beneath it: feather → pelican → signature. More in the postscript.

## The system, in brief

Before the context, the identity panel - lock-ups, symbol, reversed versions, typography and the palette taken straight from the labels:

![Primary lock-up - symbol above the wordmark](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-lockup.png)

![Horizontal lock-up](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-orizontal.png)

![Logo on a dark background](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-negativ.png)

![The symbol alone, on cream](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-simbol.png)

![Typography - Cormorant specimen](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-typo.png)

![Colour palette - cream, burgundy, black, gold](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b2-paleta.png)

## The result, in context

![Product photography mockup - Soft Red Blend](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/mock-product.jpg)

Soft Red Blend, in the studio.

![Label detail - the paper texture and the letterpress signature](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/mock-closeup.jpg)

![Lace White Blend - the white wine bottle](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/mock-lace.jpg)

![The complete family - a close-up with all four wines](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/mock-family-closeup.jpg)

The family, up close: Soft in focus, Silk, Velvet and Lace in the background.

![The complete Pelican Negru range - a panel with all four bottles](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/mock-panel.jpg)

The complete range. Three reds, one white - a single signature.

## The signature, out in the world

And because a logo lives beyond the label too - the same line, on a glass, on a barrel, on a cork, on canvas. And on the people who pick the grapes.

![T-shirt and cap with the new logo, at the grape harvest](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-oameni.jpg)

![Wine glass with the sandblasted logo](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-pahar.jpg)

![Oak barrel with the logo branded into the wood](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-butoi.jpg)

![Cork stamped with the signature pelican](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-dop.jpg)

![Canvas tote bag with the new logo](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-tote.jpg)

![Wooden wine crate with the stencilled logo](https://rt.md/academia/assets/pelican-negru/b-lada.jpg)

## Instead of a conclusion

The difference between the first version and the second is not one of craft - both are carefully made. It is one of belonging: the geometry could have been anyone’s; the signature can only be Pelican Negru’s. That is the test we take away from this study: a redesign is worth proposing only when it tells a story only that brand can tell.

And the golden story is no longer told in a whisper. It is signed.

Postscript

For now this is an exercise - it has not been sent to the winery. We made it for the same reason this whole series exists: when we see local brands and feel there is room for better, we do something. We come up with an alternative. If it ever lands on the table at Pelican Negru, we will update this page.

For the curious, a few pointers from packaging design research: elements that are unexpected but easy to decode - [“moderate incongruity”](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254316918_Understanding_schema_incongruity_as_a_process_in_advertising_Review_and_future_recommendations) - draw attention and are remembered better than the conventional; [visual metaphors on packaging](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mar.20703) raise product liking as long as they can be resolved - and the name under the feather guarantees the resolution; white-space minimalism is perceived as [modern and premium](https://www.liendesign.com/blog/why-is-wine-label-design-important); and the purchase decision is made at the shelf in a few seconds, on mostly unconscious cues. The same working philosophy continues through [Lending a Hand](https://rt.md/en/umarul/).

Up next

- [ Mar 2020
Identity

### FlyOne

An imaginary rebrand

A symbol drawn from the experience of flight, a new typeface, a pattern. And why all that still does not make a brand.

](https://rt.md/en/academia/flyone/)
- [ Feb 2020
Logo

### Tattoo studio

Same elements, better execution

Typeface, line weights, proximity, white space: a technical re-execution of the Kliuchnikoff logo.

](https://rt.md/en/academia/kliuchnikoff/)

[All studies](https://rt.md/en/academia/#studii)

Contact

## See it differently?

You can contradict us, add to this or suggest a brand for the next study. And we always answer email.

[Write to us: mail@rt.md](mailto:mail@rt.md)