Polarstern: What It Takes to Win a Bottle

The brief was blunt: design a limited edition bottle for a vodka brand. Submit it publicly. Let the internet vote. Over two hundred entries came in through Jovoto, the crowd-design platform, for their annual competition. Four reached the final. One won by a wide margin.

That one was "Polarstern"—Pole Star—by Barcelona-based designer Gabriela Berdecio: a midnight-blue bottle with a sparse starry sky across the label, clean and cold-looking, like something that belongs in an Arctic research station rather than a nightclub promotion. It pulled sixty percent of the fan vote against three other finalists. The theme was "Mystic Ice World," which is the kind of brief that usually produces a blizzard of ice crystals and generic winter imagery. Berdecio found the poetic version of the same idea instead.

Crowdsourced design competitions are a complicated thing to think about as a designer. You get genuine range—hundreds of perspectives that a single agency commission would never produce—but then you hand the selection over to a popular vote, which tends to reward the legible over the surprising. That sixty percent chose the restrained, almost abstract option says something about the audience, or maybe just that taste coheres when the options are lined up clearly. Either way, the bottle looks good. Cold and deliberate, which is exactly what it needed to be.