Crafting Paveau

Working with Paveau glassware, we’ve shaped their packaging over the years with patterns inspired by murals, British textiles, and Japanese aesthetics. When we were asked to design the packaging for the new Swirl Collection, the ambition was clear: stay true to their existing identity, but push it forward into something fresher, sharper, and more refined.

The project started the way most of our work does: with real people. We worked with illustrator Ward Nijs to explore the first visual directions through hand-drawn illustrations. The foundation was right and our ambition clear: to realise this third edition of the PAVEAU packaging entirely by hand.

The illustrative direction was inspired by toile de Jouy, an 18th-century French textile tradition in which imagery was not decorative, but narrative. Printed in a single pigment on cotton, built from extremely refined line work, with scenes flowing into one another rather than repeating.

It was precisely here that we reached a limit. The line work did not achieve the level of refinement we were searching for. So rather than forcing it, we chose to open up the process.

We took the original illustrations and started reworking them, using AI as a tool. Not to replace the drawings, but to push them further. To see how certain lines could soften, how details could get richer, how the look and feel could shift without losing what made it work in the first place.

This wasn’t a one-click thing. It was slow and sometimes very frustrating. Honestly, AI does some strange things at times. Each illustration got treated individually. Each detail rendered, adjusted, scrapped, reworked. Again and again.  Some parts worked right away but most didn’t. In the process, AI became a sketching partner that talked back, but never the one making decisions. Nothing was generated and left as is.