Cape Fynbos Gin - A redesign
The brief required the creation of two gin labels for a brand of South African craft gin. One label was to be created entirely through the use of traditional print media and the other was to be crafted using a mix of traditional and digital media. The brand I selected to work with was Cape Fynbos Gin. The original branding is as follows:
Traditional print experimentation:
For the traditional media label I started off by experimenting with the typography that could be used in the the final design. The two main typographic mediums I experimented with were the traditional letterpress and typewriter typography.
I then moved on to creating visuals for the main graphic of the bottle. Cape Fynbos Gin makes use of the fynbos that grows in the Western Cape as a graphic on its packaging, which led to the use of flowers in my final designs in order to make a finished product that was faithful to the Cape Fynbos Gin brand and aesthetic. Additionally, the original packaging had a somewhat scientific, academic feel to it, as the illustrations looked similar to the scientific illustrations scientists used to do of flowers before the advent of photography.
With this in mind I decided to create a final design that kept this academic feel, but with an arty twist to it. This led to experimentation with monotype printing and pressing flowers with the letterpress.
Some forms of printing were more successful than others. Putting ink on the flowers and pressing them with the letterpress proved to be fairly ineffective at transferring ink and resulted in faint outlines and illegible smears of ink. Monotype printing proved to be a a much more effective method for printing the flowers.
Final labels:
The traditional label, below on the left, makes use of a monotype print of flowers that resemble Western Cape fynbos as closely as possible. Traditional letterpress typography was used for the name of the gin, the main typographic element of the bottle, and typewriter type was used for the smaller type at the bottom of the label.
The mixed media label makes use of a similar format to the traditional label in order to keep the brandiong consistent. This label makes use of a flower that was first sketched and then monotype printed and digitally overlaid over flower geometry as it's main graphic. The other digital changes made for the mixed media label included inverting the type used on the label, to make it stand out a bit better and adding black accents to "Fynbos Gin" to place emphasis on it and make it more legible.
