Designed for Karrie Brueck, Shovel Mountain Winery
Designed with DeLane Designs, Self-owned Freelance Design Firm
The Ask
Create a logo for our winery that can be placed on wine bottles, labels, t-shirts, and other promotional products.
RESEARCH
When looking into Shovel Mountian as a place, it captured the essence of Texas, that is, the location felt very rustic and "Texan" at heart. The whole property and the use of the natural aesthetic and connection to nature through the architecture, the interior design of the Airbnb, as well as the vineyard, all felt like the Texas hill country.
Pictures of the interior, exterior, and birds-eye view of the Airbnb and vineyard on site. Photo Credit to Rob Brueck.
PROTOTYPE AND CO-DESIGN
During the story session with the client, we discussed details about what their core values were, and how they portrayed that. The idea of homegrown and family-owned vineyards came up frequently; this wasn't a wine that you could go buy at your local grocery store. This led to us having a conversation about symbolism and what it meant to own a family-owned winery. Karrie discussed this idea of being a local gem and something that is not well known to the public. I probed with her a bit more to get her thoughts on what she thought made their winery unique amongst a sea of others. She remarked that the Airbnb on property was something that a lot of other local wineries didn't offer, which enhances the experience for customers.
Going off this, we began a co-design session where Karrie and I sat down and exchanged ideas, sketches, and moved into physical making.
Sketch provided by the client.
The ideas Karrie posed showed her interest in including a shovel, to help drive home the messaging of the vineyard's name of Shovel Mountian. What piqued my interest was the idea of having a landscape logo. I asked and questioned this notion, mainly alluding to if they were to put this on a wine bottle, the logo may not be as recognizable, given it's being wrapped on a cylinder vs being static on a website or other paper-based means.
DESIGN
The first iteration focused on the more vertical format proposed by Karrie. She did like the shovel graphic but mentioned that the font seemed to be a bit too trendy and chiché.
She mentioned the idea of making it dirty, as the property was based on a ranch and farmland. She also proposed making the shovel stand upright.
The second iteration focused now on the vertical format, adopting a new, squared-off font, similar to something you'd see on a whiskey bottle or label. Karrie enjoyed the font, but now saw the shovel graphic as awkward, the shape of the end of the shovel akin to the silhouette of a building. With this, I proposed that we make the edge of the shovel sharper, resembling a mountain peak, to hone in on the messaging of being a shovel that looks like a mountain.
Another staple we discussed was the idea of the natural wildlife at the winery. Their winery had a lot of armadillos, so we established an armadillo motif in this version. She really enjoyed the pointed shovel, which helped establish more of a baseline of what the shovel would look like. However, we discussed the idea of the logo being adaptable, so we combined the pointed shovel with the more circular ideration into one final design.
The final iteration honed in on this notion of the shovel and mountain being one graphic. Karrie and the group loved the logo and settled on this as their final logo. One principle of the logo was the idea of it being adaptable to being placed on white and dark backgrounds, which gave them the freedom to produce the logo on multiple facets (t-shirts, wine labels, etc).
