22 Jan “Found Art” – Bird Heads Brand Tres Sabores New Wine!

Julie Johnson, Tres Sabores Winery’s founder, winemaker and owner, is what I call an “activist” client. Activist clients are fully engaged. They don’t wait around for you (the designer) to come up with a solution. They know where they want to go before I do.

Like many designs I have done for Tres Sabores over the years, Julie’s new Willamette Valley (Oregon) White Blend was well formed in her head. The artwork was a piece she purchased in South America a decade or so ago. It was a fun scratchboard rendering of straw men – each one with a bird perched on the figure’s head.

Not A Corporate Look!

It was decided that the label should be a full wrap on a burgundy bottle. The back label would be a random expression like the illustration. That’s where the hand-writing came in. To make the label pass ATF compliance, we added fonts to make it legal but still kept things loose enough to be interesting. In other words, we were not going for a corporate buttoned down look.

Once I had all the visual elements I processed each one though Photoshop and Illustrator. Since this design would print in black reverse, I wanted the entire design to end-up as vector artwork. This would give us the highest level of reproduction.

It takes time to make things appear random.

The straw men artwork, once on the bottle, was a little narrow. I duplicated one of the figures, flopped the image, and placed him on the right. Voilà, the width problem was solved. Our straw man line-up wrapped around the bottle from left to right.

The back label was a little tricky. The hand writing (thanks to Jon Engelskirger – Julie’s winemaker husband) had to be sized and positioned to fit and still be legible. That involved a little back and forth. Sometimes it takes time to make things appear random.

We had a tight bottling date so there was little time to waste. The process moved quickly from Julie to me and back again. Once we got things where we liked it, we showed the layout to Julie’s compliance expert. Suggestions were made and executed. It was done and moved to the printer.