Belgrade-based illustrator and visual storyteller Kristina Jovanovic, aka kiikii.jova, transforms a wine label into a small emotional narrative about love, pressure and the resilience of a heart that keeps opening itself regardless.
A wine label is among the most constrained canvases an illustrator can work with: small, functional, expected to sell something. Kristina Jovanovic used hers to say something true about love.
You Squeezed My Heart!!! is one of six illustrated labels featured on the cover of the Club de Creatividad Yearbook 2025, produced by Madrid agency Supperstudio. The yearbook is a prestigious annual publication by the Spanish Club de Creativos, and Jovanovic’s contribution to its cover turns the format into exactly what she intended: a collectible piece of storytelling that earns its place through emotional precision rather than decorative appeal. At the centre of the illustration is a heart held in a hand, already bearing the stitched scars of previous damage, while new love butterflies continue to flutter toward it regardless. The image does not choose between heartbreak and hope. It holds both at once, which is, of course, the more honest position.
“I wanted to turn a wine label into a small, emotional narrative,” Jovanovic says, “a visual story about love, heartbreak, and the resilience of the human heart.”
The surreal, symbolic language she works in is well-suited to that ambition: bold colour and dramatic form allow feelings that resist direct articulation to become legible through image. Her process involved experimenting with shapes and forms to translate raw feeling into something tangible, working through the visual problem of how chaos and tenderness can occupy the same composition without cancelling each other out.
The result is a piece that operates on two registers at once. As a label it is immediately striking, designed to hold attention on a shelf or a page. As an illustration it rewards closer reading, the detail of the stitching, the continued arrival of the butterflies, the hand that holds rather than protects or releases. That layered quality is characteristic of work that treats packaging not as a container for a product but as a surface for a story.
Kristina Jovanovic is a multidisciplinary creative, illustrator and visual storyteller based in Belgrade. She studied Graphic Design and Visual Communication at the University of Arts in Belgrade and completed her master’s at BAU in Barcelona, where the kiikii.jova project began. Her work combines bold colour and playful, emotive characters to explore individuality, freedom and artistic expression. She is represented by The Mushroom Company.
ARTIST LINKS
kiikiijova.com
@kiikii.jova.allover
You Squeezed My Heart!!!, 2025. Digital print, featured on Club de Creatividad Yearbook 2025 cover. Photography and 3D renders by Supperstudio.
