I actually remembered how to make a Negroni last week, which is more impressive than it sounds. There was a time I could make one without checking my phone or staring into the drinks cabinet waiting for divine intervention.

Gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. Equal parts. Stirred over ice with orange peel.

That’s the recipe. The rest is mostly confidence and a good shake.

Of course, not every cocktail is quite so easy to remember. There are thousands of the things, many with names that give absolutely no clue what you’re about to drink. “Mint to Be” or “Kitten Punch.” A dainty sip wrapped in a rugged name, or a classic twisted just far enough to make you laugh. Half the fun lives in the pun. The other half is remembering what actually goes in the glass.

That’s usually when The Cocktail Cabinet gets pulled out. Designed by Aussie studio A Friend of Mine, it turns cocktail recipes into a deck of cards, ready for the moment someone casually orders a Boulevardier and your brain completely blue-screens.

Ingredients, ratios and methods are laid out clearly enough to flick through while pretending you knew all along. It looks the part too, essentially your bartender brain translated into cardstock. Cooler than a laminated bar mat and far more reliable than your mate Dave, who’s absolutely convinced tonic works in everything.

The Negroni is probably one of the easier cards in the deck. Three ingredients, equal measures, but each is doing something very different. The gin brings the backbone, vermouth brings sweetness and depth, Campari brings bitterness. Even the ice is doing more than keeping it cold. As it melts, dilution changes the drink.

Start messing with those proportions and you notice pretty quickly. Add more ingredients simply because you can and you might make something interesting, but you haven’t necessarily made the Negroni any better.

It may sound corny, but good cocktails are a lot like good design.

Packaging projects can accumulate ideas just as easily. A new opening feature gets added, marketing likes a particular finish, sustainability wants less material, operations needs it to run at speed and procurement would quite like the whole thing to cost less.

None of those requirements is unreasonable. Getting them to work together is the design.

That’s why I like the Negroni comparison. It isn’t minimal for the sake of being minimal. There’s no prize for having the fewest ingredients, just as there’s no prize for having the fewest packaging components. What matters is understanding what each one contributes and getting the balance right.

Although, unlike packaging design, a Negroni is considerably easier to test. And the feedback tends to arrive sooner.