We came a long way, baby! I’ve created a lot of wine and packaging labels, and every once in awhile you get one that goes through many transformations until it finds a skin that matches it’s personality. This is one such story. We started out with the direction to do a somewhat generic design with a crest or other insignia element. The result was nice…but missing something. We took another approach to make a label with a pattern or watermark in the background that would possibly be created in metallic ink or foil. Again, a beautiful design, not quite right for the product. We came to the conclusion that this label with a name that means “good home” in italian needed some kind of image of a home, and the client had a sketch they wanted to try to incorporate.
With a sketch this busy, technically speaking, it would be best to use only a portion of it or to screen it back in the background so that the text could still be read on top of it. The client also wanted to see it in a very high contrast version in which the text would be printed in a metallic or foil. But even after many attempts the label simply didn’t work with the high-contrast full coverage background. At this point we understood that we liked and wanted an artistic feel, featuring a home, house, or building, to have an italian villa/architectural feel and that we may need to contain the high contrast to just an area instead of full coverage.
So with those refined parameters I took it back to my sketchbook and attempted to channel my inner DaVinci (ha ha!). I drew some sketches that felt to me like an italian house, village and vineyard. Those adobe tile roofs and stately windows and the tuscan tall evergreen trees… plus the idea of something that could be high contrast. The sketches I did of single houses still left us with the problem of filling the background with something interesting, but this sketch I did of a neighborhood seemed to lend itself to working around the type allowing us to have the high contrast but remain legible. Being able to light up the houses with gold foil made them feel like “good homes”, and finally we had a label that fit it’s name…warm, welcoming, and home
