The Association of Bars and Restaurants of Benicarló, together with the City Council, annually organizes a gastronomic event dedicated to the local agricultural star: the artichoke.

During the harvest months (January and February), local restaurants offer two events:
The first one is called «Jornades del Pinxo», and it’s about gourmet snacks, normally served with drinks at a convenient price.
A map with «snacks route» is distributed to encourage people to try them all. Costumers can vote for their favourites, while a specialized jury votes on their own choice. As a result, the winners gets the prize, called «Golden artichoke».
The second event deals with a more formal restaurant format, a fixed price menu; where a whole service based on fresh local artichokes is offered, from starters to special desserts.

City Council is in charge to select the poster design for every year event. In 2022 recognized graphic artist Javier Mariscal was designated to do so.

Even though it was an honor for me to design the content of the catalogs whose cover would be Mariscal’s design, I was clear from the beginning that it would not be appropriate to use parts of that design for the interior layouts.

I wanted to make a clean and clear layout to deliver all the information, and make it easy to read; but it was also crystal clear from the beginning that I wanted to set a distance from the previous editions’ layouts, that were extremely boring, didn’t show any graphic intention at all, and seemed made only to get by with the least possibly effort….
 
As a celebration of local produce, as a tribute to the talent of the chefs, as an invitation to people to come together to taste excellent cuisine, I chose a festive color palette, derived from the predominant tones in the poster. I also grabbed the concept of transparency present in the scene of the poster, where light filters through the leaves of the vine, to generate a graphic universe with which to develop the design of the pages.
 
The design was clearly divided into two parts, due to the bilingual nature of the information, I converted the format to a vertical one, giving it a more lively look and giving me the chance to distribute the elements more freely.
 
In previous editions the map was taken straight from Google. It was hard to read and impersonal. I drew a map focusing on the commercial area, where the restaurants are, instead of visualice the entire town.
 
Each year many people from Spain come to enjoy our celebration, so the location of the restaurants on a map is a must. That’s why I simplified the info, and placed some landmarks on it.
 
In the snacks brochure, that map also had to suggest three different routes to try the different choices, I solved it by adding bold lines in vivid colours to guide outsiders. Those lines run through the entire document, giving it unity, and make a visual statement on which path each snack was available..
 
The layout values for the two brochures were the same, but for the snack’s pictures were added, and the size of the paper also changed.
 
Apart from the printed versions, all the material was also available as digital files in the organisers websites.
 
A «passport» was designed to explain the promo’s rules, in which participants could win a large number of different prizes, the more snacks they tried, the more chances of winning.