(04) Project

Tana

Branding for a wine & listening bar

Brand: Tana
Year: 2026
Disciplines: Brand identity; Art direction; Motion design

Tana’s front door in the evening, with the garnet sign and people out in the street, shot with direct flash

Tana is a wine & listening bar: from six you’re at the bar with wine by the glass, from nine you listen to a whole record, start to finish. I created the complete branding: name, mark, venue, objects, launch, website and brand book.

(01)

Two acts, one evening

Tana was made for drinking well without the ceremony of a traditional wine bar, and for hearing music properly, not as background noise. Its crowd is aged between 25 and 50, curious about wine, music and design, and turns up in the jumper and trainers of any ordinary evening.

The bar and the listening run through every part of the brand: with only the bar, Tana would be a wine bar like any other; with only the listening, a concert hall.

The bar at Tana at six: red wine poured by the glass, under the honey-coloured vault

The console at Tana at nine: one young man puts the record on, another holds up the sleeve

(02)

The name and chi c’è

A tana is a den, a hideaway, and it’s also home base in hide-and-seek: ‘tana libera tutti’, the call that sets everyone free. The logo is TANA in letters cut out with scissors, their edges wavering slightly: the warmth comes from the hand, not from the colour.

Next to the logo lives ‘chi c’è’ (‘who’s there’), a dark dome with two eyes that always peeks up from the bottom edge. It’s the social media profile picture, it’s on the labels and the coasters, and it moves: it turns up, reads the wine list, listens to a record, winks. I animated it like a paper cut-out.

(03)

Colours and typefaces

There are four colours. Garnet covers the large surfaces, the sign and the posters; ink draws the logo and the darkness of the den; cork acts as the paper; sage appears only on the white wine. Garnet is a dark, brownish red, a long way from the bright red of trattoria signs.

Three typefaces, each with its own job: Avara for a single word or number, Gambetta for the name of the evening’s wine and record, Suisse for everything else.

(04)

The venue

The venue is two rooms, one after the other, like the two acts of the evening. At the front is the bar, under a barrel vault in honey-coloured lime plaster, with a brushed-steel counter and a garnet bench. A pietra serena arch leads through to the listening room, with timber walls right up to the vaults, a long table and the centre left clear.

At the far end of the room the console sits between two steel horn speakers, in front of the record wall. The lighting is low and soft, as it would be at home. From outside, you know the place by the enamelled sheet-metal sign above the arched doorway, lit by a spotlight.

Tana’s garnet sign above the front door in the evening, with two people in the doorway

Tana’s listening room: timber walls, the console between the horn speakers and the record wall

A group of friends at Tana’s long table, with wine poured by the glass

(05)

At the bar

At the bar, you can tell it’s Tana from the objects: the wine glass with the logo sandblasted into it, the pulpboard coaster with chi c’è, the long, narrow wine list, the cork with its neck tag, the apron and the stationery. To take home there’s the garnet tote bag, printed with ‘ultimo giro, giuro’ (‘last round, I swear’), and the bottle bag.

A hand sets a glass of red down on a Tana coaster, next to the bottle

Tana’s long, narrow wine list on a cork background

Tana’s wine list on the wooden table in the evening

Tana’s stationery on the bar, next to a wine glass

The Tana cork next to a bunch of keys, on wood

The neck tag for the Tana cork, front and back

A young man at the bar with Tana’s garnet tote bag over his shoulder

Tana’s paper bag with a bottle in it, hanging from a chair

(06)

The house wine

The house red and white have the word stacked on the label, ‘ro/sso’ and ‘bian/co’, and no vintage. The words are big so that people who can’t tell red from green can read them too: on the bottle, colour alone wouldn’t be enough.

Bottle of Tana’s red, with a garnet label and ‘ro/sso’ stacked

Bottle of Tana’s white, with a cork label and ‘bian/co’ stacked

Tana’s red and white on the bar with wine glasses, in the evening

Tana’s white in an ice bucket, next to a plate

(07)

The listening night

The listening night has its own A3 poster: a one-word title and a photo inside the silhouette of chi c’è. Around it are the ‘sessions’ record, the stories, the night’s playlist, the pass to keep on your phone and photos of the night on Instagram: the amp, the request book, the record brought to the bar.

A3 poster for Tana’s listening night: the title ‘coltrane’ and the photo inside the silhouette of chi c’è

The sleeve of Tana’s ‘sessions’ record next to the turntable

Tana’s ‘sessions’ record: the sleeve, the back with the tracklist and the two labels

Tana Instagram story: Rossese at the bar

Tana Instagram story: the record on the turntable

A hand turns up the amplifier, with a glass of red resting on top

A record handed across the bar to the person serving, in a Tana apron

Tana’s request book, with records written in by hand

Fried snacks and white wine at the bar at Tana

Tana’s playlist for the night on a phone

Tana’s Instagram grid: photos from the night and graphics for the events

The four covers of Tana’s playlists: from six, from nine, at one, on a break

The Tana pass in the phone’s Wallet, with its QR code

(08)

Before the opening, in the square

Before the opening, chi c’è becomes a listening booth the size of a phone box and heads out into the square: garnet sheet metal, the logo on top, chi c’è on the side and a velvet curtain instead of a door. Inside, between cork walls, you stand at the steel console and listen on headphones fixed to the turntable.

You book a slot, and every week the booth moves to a different square; on opening day it stands outside the bar’s front door. It’s a pop-up, made of lightweight panels that go up and come down easily.

Photo of the square: Mr Allan Parsons, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Tana’s garnet listening booth in the square at night, with people queuing outside the curtain

Inside Tana’s listening booth: two young people in headphones at the steel console, shot from the ceiling

(09)

The website

The website follows the evening. It opens with two photos of the venue, the bar at 6pm and the console at 9pm, and TANA across the full width. Below come three bands of colour: at 6pm we open, at 9pm we listen, at 1am it’s the last round. At the bottom chi c’è sits on the name and says goodbye: ‘Ci vediamo al banco.’ (‘See you at the bar.’)

The Tana website home page: two tilted photos of the bar and the console, and TANA across the full width

The Tana website: the evening’s line of copy and the three bands for 6pm, 9pm and 1am

The Tana website footer: chi c’è sitting on the name and ‘Ci vediamo al banco.’

(10)

The brand book

All of this goes into a 49-page brand book: who Tana is, the logo and chi c’è, the colours, the typefaces, the tone of voice and the applications, with the sizes to order from suppliers. It’s written so that the bar could open in another city too, without me.