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client

Tony Chocolonely

year

2025

agency

Chuck Studios

project

distinctive brand asset design

work

strategy, art direction, design

When defining a Distinctive Brand Asset (DBA) that can be truly owned by the brand, you always start by looking for something unique to the product.

We dove into Tony’s brilliant and comprehensive brand guidelines and analysed the competitors to define its unique domain.

Tony’s bar is generous and thick. Among all the domains we identified, we agreed as a team that “Chunkiness” is the one that speaks to it the most.

Because Tony’s bar is so generous, we noticed that almost everyone snaps off a piece starting from the corner, the most “grabbable” part of the unevenly designed bar.

This is how Niel was born, named after Neil Armstrong, the OG of “firsts.”

It’s the corner that pops out of the bar, almost as if it’s eager to jump straight into your mouth.

A DBA that transforms the product into an irresistible piece of deliciousness.

Together with Niel, we identified several visual and behavioral codes to build a sandbox, a creative framework that, through consistent use, will shape a distinctive and recognizable design system for Tony’s communications.

With the flexibility of the playbook we created, we produced a series of visuals.
Inspired by old-school Disney movies we used layers of glass to position the ingredients from the different flavoured bars against a paper background, visually anticipating the texture and feel of the raw wrapping paper.

The result is a vibrant series of tasty chocolate visuals, ready to be used across DOOH, online, and print.

Tony’s Chocolonely, often shortened to Tony’s, is a Dutch chocolate manufacturer and seller created in 2005 by television producer and journalist Teun van de Keuken as a protest against child exploitation and slavery in the chocolate industry.

Today it’s an iconic, tasty product with a strong purpose: making the industry fairer for everyone, especially for farmers.