Collaborative Print Project- WINE LABELS

Assembling the bottles

For the final project, we were instructed that the class would be broken up in to groups of three or four people, and each group would develop a cencent for a collaborative class project. Each project proposal had to aim to showcase each designers work in set or series. While various media could be used to develop the imagery or text, all design pieces had to be digital in the final format and converted into a process color image. To narrow down which project the class would all rally behind and produce, we had a critique day where we went thru each proposal and voted on the final project that would go in to action. My group made a proposal to each design a wine label for a set of government approved wine brand names that were in need of labels before they could be bottled and shipped out across the nation. My family friend, Paul Kalemkiarian, is a wine entrepreneur that owns the "Wine of the Month Club" based in Monrovia, California. He owns the rights to six "brand names" for wines, kind of like the equivalent to owning a web domain or something, before the actual site has been created. The exciting part about this project is that each student, depending on the strength and accuracy of their design in following labeling regulations and policies, would automatically carry the potential to be picked up and used for bottling and shipped out across the country!- granted that Mr. K would want to use it. Although our class had several strong ideas that would have been successful in satisfying the project requirements, our class was very ambitious in that they went ahead and selected my group's project.

Production 2: Final revision of the booklet

Immediately the class was divided up into groups- the art directors that would over see the concept and determine the final outcome of the project, Production #1 that would focus on quality control of the labels and printing of the labels to be placed on the bottles for photography, the Marketing Team that organized the photography of the mocked up bottles as well as preparing the final "Design Tasting" presentation party at the end of the project, Production #2 that would be responsible for creating the template for a booklet to compile everyone's labels into one catalogue and having it printing thru an outside company, and the Traffic Team that aided in setting up the GoogleDocs and kept everyone on track with the timeline for the project and budget of $1000 donated by Roski. On top of that, everyone's individual responsibility was to design a label to "showcase" their design aesthetic. Everyone worked incredibly diligently to ensure the completion and success of this project. It was a really great experience to able to lead a group of my peers in a design project- something I have obviously never done before but enjoyed the responsibility of it very much.

Here is a link to the Googledocs that will further reveal the process and updates that the class received throughout the course of the project: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B5_qqmqZDVC8NWMwYzc3NGItNTQzNy00OWNiLThkMmItYWJhM2E2YWU5YjVk&hl=en&invite=CLqg4fsC

Here is the brief I wrote for the introduction of the booklet/ catalogue:

The Booklet!!

This is a catalogue of the collaborative work of the FA 302 Design students at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.

It all started out when we obtained permission to work with six government-approved wine “brand names”. They held potential to exist as bottled wines in the world, but were nothing more than names- they lacked an image, they lacked labels. This is where we stepped in as designers. Our challenge was to each interpret one of the wine names however we saw fit, keeping in mind our target audience as well as government labeling regulations. We all addressed the same fundamental “problems” by utilizing our personal strengths as designers. Therefore, through wine labels, our individual aesthetics are showcased in a uniform format, allowing us to present the range of possibilities for something that deserves the unique consideration of a designer. Now these brand names and blank bottles have been given the visual design elements they once lacked, fulfilling their potential to be produced, bottled, and enjoyed. 

Removing the labels in the bathtub :)

My personal process, aside from keeping the class posted regularly on the status of our project, included meetings with Mr. Kalemkiarian (who also donated the bottles we mocked up with our labels!), researching government labeling regulations and laws, creating diagrams for the class to follow, researching local printing companies, and keeping tabs on the rest of the groups to make sure everything flowed as smoothly as possible. Lots and lots of emailing occurred :) 

I began by going to a market to observe the wine aisle and get my hands on some bottles to see what I liked and didn't like, what popped off the shelf, what spoke sophistication, etc., etc. I found this step to be really helpful in getting fresh ideas and see the range of possibilities in bending the rules/laws of label design in order to incorporate all of the required elements without sacrificing artistic design. 

dancing man doodle

Next I started tie-dying sheets of paper towels with food coloring so that the dye patterns would look more authentic and natural than the perfect swirled images you could find on the internet. My first round of designing just seemed too obvious though, for the name "Tie Dye". I wanted to push it further. But first, I decided to move on and get fresh eyes by designing for "Dancing Man Vineyards" for a while. For this design, I hand drew some little dancing figures to get the looseness and flow that would come with a fun night of drinking wine and dancing. I scanned in the figures and hand-rendered text and continued the design on the computer by live-tracing and adding body copy, etc. I still wasn't really satisfied though. I decided to go back to Tie Dye, and start fresh. I didn't want tie dye to be the main visual element because it seemed so obvious. It was really kind of limiting. So instead, I began sourcing popular 1960's era posters, drawings, album art, typography, etc. I found this to be much more intriguing and went with it...