Margherita Caspani’s Venice Cocktail Menu Wins the 2025 DI Award

Margherita Caspani’s “Veniceland” shows how an illustrated menu can carry an idea beyond the page. Created for Experimental Cocktail Club Venice, the project pairs 18 images with cocktails inspired by the city’s legends and history. The illustrations also appear on promotional materials and custom glassware, giving the work several formats through which to tell its story.

The project received the DI Cross Category Award at the World Illustration Awards 2025. It was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Professional Design Product & Packaging category, and selected as the DI Award winner from the professional projects shortlisted that year. For illustrators working across editorial and branded commissions, the project offers a useful example of one visual concept moving between a printed menu, an object guests handle and a venue’s wider promotional presence.

One illustration series, several points of contact

The brief brings together two subjects with plenty of visual material: Venice’s history and the culture of cocktails. Caspani made 18 illustrations, each connected to a drink and a story associated with the city. That structure gives the menu a clear organizing principle. Rather than treating the images as decoration around a list of drinks, the project links each image to a particular cocktail and its inspiration.

That relationship can help a menu work as an experience as well as a reference. A guest can encounter a drink through its name and description, then through the image that gives its story a visual form. The same illustrations extend onto custom-designed glassware and promotional pieces, allowing the identity to recur in different settings. The source doesn’t specify the materials, printing methods, typefaces or colour palette, so those details can’t be attributed to the project; what it does establish is the deliberate spread of the artwork across multiple touchpoints.

See “Veniceland: Illustrated menu for Experimental Cocktail Club in Venice” for the project details.

A visual voice shaped by illustration and animation

Caspani is an illustrator from Milan and a graduate with honors in Illustration and Animation from IED Milan, where she now teaches. Her work is described as dreamily ironic and elegantly quirky. That combination suggests a practice comfortable with wit and imaginative departures, qualities that can give narrative assignments a distinct point of view while still serving a client’s subject.

Her recognition includes a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators in New York, two World Illustration Awards and two Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts. The 2025 DI Award adds a further distinction tied to “Veniceland,” while the project’s shortlist and Highly Commended status place it within the awards’ product and packaging category as well.

Her client list spans publishing, news, culture and consumer brands: Apple, Il Sole 24 Ore, Corriere della Sera, L’Espresso, La Repubblica, Internazionale, Acqua di Parma, VeraLab, LaFeltrinelli, DeAgostini, FuoriSalone and Piccolo Teatro. That range makes the Venice menu a fitting example of illustration applied to a branded setting, with the work designed to function across both communication and physical objects.

A career resource attached to the award

The DI Award includes a marketing package in the WORKBOOK’s Directory of Illustration, valued at $2,700 US dollars. It comprises a 100-image professional portfolio on directoryofillustration.com and a one-on-one consultation with a Directory of Illustration marketing consultant about presenting work to the American market. For an illustrator, a portfolio is both a selection of images and a way to frame the kind of work they want to attract; the consultation is intended to help Caspani shape that presentation for a specific audience.

The practical lesson in “Veniceland” is its connected system: a defined set of illustrations gives a menu its own narrative, then travels onto objects and promotional materials that meet guests elsewhere. That approach can be useful when a commission needs to feel cohesive across formats. Start with the central story, build image-to-content relationships, and consider early how the artwork will function at each point of use.

Explore more of Caspani’s work through her Directory of Illustration portfolio, website and Instagram. And, as the original profile notes, she still finds time to draw the occasional duck.