Sacred geometry, design, and its effect beyond what it needs to tell you about the product.

There we were — a group of friends, coffee, as every Thursday morning after a sunrise walk. I'd given everyone an Antidote bar. Alejandra, who received the Orange + Earl Grey, came back a few minutes later and said: "Red, did you pay for the sacred geometry?" It was a joke but I hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

The packaging is part of the product and experience for me. To give it a frame — just like the interior in hospitality, where I grew up in. Later I studied and worked in design & advertising, then in brand and packaging. So when it came time to build Antidote, I wanted the design to do more than tell you about its contents. To be part of the experience — together with the power of Antidote to make your day a little lighter.

When I sat down to design the illustrations for the Queens of Paradise series, I was thinking of the realm of a circus. The big top. The conjurer's circle — hat, wand, white rabbit, silk scarves, the cabinet for disappearing acts. Someone who makes you see something that operates by rules you don't fully understand. I wanted the illustrations to live in that space: precise, geometric, and somehow slightly beyond what you can name.

Good design, is never the loudest thing in the room. You don't look at it and think wow, what a design. You just sense how it makes you feel. Eventually you forget it's there — which means it worked.

I was also inspired by Emma Kunz — a Swiss healer and artist born in 1892 who created enormous, precise geometric works on graph paper. She used them as healing tools, as a way of accessing information she believed lived beyond the rational. She never considered herself an artist and never exhibited her work in her lifetime. It was only discovered after her death, and is now held at the Museum Emma Kunz Zentrum in Aargau, Switzerland, recognized as some of the most extraordinary visionary art of the 20th century.

What moves me about her work is what it alludes to — and the energy it brings forward. I thought about her when I sat down to draw my circus inspired illustrations. Intuitively, I was following something, perhaps similarly to how she did. And when you scan it and ask ChatGPT about the sacred geometry meaning, it will give you an analysis far bigger than what I could put into words.

So — does our packaging have any impact on you?  — we'd love to hear any thoughts to it.

Queens of Paradise is available at antidotechocolate.com. The lilac and yellow bar is called Queen Orange.