Brief 6: Shop Front Signage

Brief 6: Bottle Carrier Net

Lisa has already found packaging nets for our gift boxes, but we decided that it would also be useful to provide a bottle carrier for customers purchasing several bottles. Unfortunately there is limited content online in this area, but here a few examples that I have found. 

I also took a free bottle carrier from Tesco to take apart so that I could look at the net in more detail, and it's kind of complicated. 

Comparing the six and four bottle carriers, the six bottle carriers are more practical but also a lot more cumbersome, whilst the four bottle carrier is a lot more compact and seems more stylish, with sleeker lines. I want to try and find a net for a four bottle carrier to see how the nets compare and which will be easier and better to produce. 

Brief 6: More Packaging Research

Brief 6: Greenbar Collective Distillery

Greenbar Collective Distillery are an American company producing organic, hand crafted spirits. The collective represent the largest portfolio of spirits, and each of their spirits has a distinctive design. As I found looking at other brands with different products, the main way they communicate the differences is through colour, although they also use interesting illustrations that add to the desirability of the product. The designs are mainly very contemporary, but are more detailed than many label designs which are often more simplistic, using mostly type. I love the Fruitlab bottles, but am less keen on the Bar Keep bottles because they feel quite cluttered, and the typefaces don't really seem to fit with the illustrations being used. I think finding these designs was valauble though because it gives us an idea of what other brands have done with similar products, and also allows Lisa and I to identify aspects of the design that we would and wouldn't like to use in our own work. 
images sourced from thedieline

Brief 6: Primary Research

I went to Booths to photograph their range of gins, vodkas and rums. They have a wide selection of gin and vodka, less so with the rum. I photographed packaging that I felt reflected our ideas for the High Spirits brief: luxe and high quality. What I did notice from researching into the packaging already out there is that many of the bottles use foiling and metallic colours to set themselves apart from the cheaper brands, and the bottles used were more unusually shaped, again to distinguish themselves and make their products more desirable. The heritage brands had much busier labels, whilst the more contemporary brands used sans serif typography and a more minimalist approach.

Brief 6: Consistency in Packaging

Because me and Lisa are creating a series of products that would hypothetically all be distilled/produced and sold by us, we need to create a series of labels that have consistency whilst also communicating the differences between the products that we make. I have tried to find examples of packaging that was created as part of series to look at how they successfully retain consistency in their designs.

The Industry City Distillery is the creation of The City Foundry who are a research and design group (apparently). You can kind of tell they're from Brooklyn reading their description of themselves which I found on this blog post. But they've made some very nice packaging so I can't judge them too much. The main difference in the designs of the different vodkas is the colour, which I kind of assumed would be the main way to communicate variety, other than that the packaging is very simple and bold, and it manages to reference traditional alcohol label design through use of the smaller red typeface, although really this is a very contemporary design. 

Again, the most noticeable difference between these bottles of Scrappy's Bitters is the colour, although there are smaller differences between the bottles such as the shapes housing the descriptive type, which adds a little more interest, but also serves a practical purpose as each of the titles varies in length and so the design obviously needed to be adapted. The design of these bottles is more traditional, using illustrations, etched backgrounds and serif typefaces to create something that feels a little more collectable and old timey. I like the little bit of gold foiling they have used on the label as well, it adds a nice touch and I'm a sucker for gold foiling anyways.   

Again, these Art in the Age Of bottles use colour as the main identifier between the different spirits, but what I liked about these is the designs they have applied to the back of the bottles, which are a surprising contrast to the front of the bottle which is quite contemporary and simple. It would be interesting to try and use a mix of illustration and type on our own label designs, although it would likely be in a simpler style than this. 
All images have been taken from thedieline

Brief 6: High Spirits Alcohol Packaging Research

These are a selection of images that have been taken from the website of design studio Stranger and Stranger, who specialise in packaging design for alcohol brands. This is a small selection of what is actually on their site, but I was trying to select labels that have a style similar to how Lisa and I want our branding to look, with a mix of old and new, traditional and modern. Personally, Hangar vodka, Jack Daniels and Kraken Rum's label designs are the ones that inspire me the most as I think they have the best blend of traditional label design but with a fresher take. They also seem the most luxe and desirable, and have more unique bottle shapes, which I think adds to their appeal.