Il Cerchio Bio
Role
Designer
Industry
Food & Beverage
Duration
4 Weeks
Client
Il Cerchio Bio
Year
2025
Designing a website for an organic winery in the heart of Tuscany involves striking a delicate balance between the warmth and slowness of the land and the clarity and immediacy of the digital experience. For Il Cerchio, the challenge was to establish an online presence that would encapsulate the essence of the location — its soil, its seasons and its dedication to organic farming — while maintaining usability and visual sophistication.
Concept & Vision
The central design principle was authenticity as structure. Every layout decision, typographic choice and colour had to evoke the winery's physical reality — its terracotta, deep forest greens and aged wood — while remaining accessible to the full spectrum of the target audience, including wine lovers, restaurant owners, environmentally conscious consumers and nature enthusiasts visiting Tuscany for the first time.
The site is not a shop. It is an invitation. The architecture is designed to guide visitors through a narrative experience, converting them through the story of the land, the philosophy of organic viticulture and the character of the wines themselves.
Layout and visual language
Two layout approaches were developed and tested. The first approach focuses the narrative on a single vertical scroll. A full-bleed background photograph anchors the hero section, which contains the brand name, tagline and call to action, all layered over the photograph in a transparent overlay. The second approach distributes content across dedicated pages — 'About', 'Products' with a carousel, 'Contact' with a map and newsletter module — giving each section its own visual breathing room and structural logic. Both approaches share a consistent navigation bar with a logo that is transparent on the hero and solid when scrolling, with social icons integrated to the right.
Typography & Colour
The typographic system is built entirely around Blacker Pro, the same typeface used throughout Dimitri Angelini's portfolio. Blacker Pro Text Light is used for the display hierarchy — from 64 pt titles down to 24 pt subtitles — and its high-contrast serifs evoke the classical tradition of Italian wine labels while remaining legible on screen. Blacker Pro Text Book is used for body text and secondary information, maintaining the elegance of the display weight at reading sizes.
The colour palette is built around three values drawn directly from the landscape and the product: a deep burgundy red as the primary colour, which anchors the brand in the colour of the wine itself; a dark forest green as the secondary colour, which references the winery's commitment to the environment; and an optional terracotta tone for accent moments, which completes a palette that is simultaneously appetising, trustworthy and rooted in place.
Mockup and responsive design:
The design was prototyped for desktop and mobile simultaneously to ensure that the atmospheric quality of the full-screen hero image could be translated into the constraints of a smartphone viewport. On mobile, the navigation menu is accessed via a hamburger icon, the gallery images are displayed in a vertical sequence and the call-to-action button scales to a full-width touch target, preserving the user experience.
Outcome
Il Cerchio's website is a digital extension of the winery itself: unhurried, grounded and honest. It shows that effective web design for artisan producers is not about spectacle, but about creating an online presence that makes visitors feel as if they already know the place, even before they have set foot in Tuscany.
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