OUGD603 - Starpack Collab - Bottle Development

After our experimentation session we had a clear idea of what direction we wanted to go down design wise. We used bold lines to separate the information on the labels, with a short description on each. I think that the use of the serifs here really adds to the sophistication. I am not sure about the use of colours however and the positioning of the illustration. Looking back at the research I realised that most of the bottles we had looked at used the designs straight onto the glass bottles.

So we went back and rearranged our illustrations so that they weren’t covering the whole bottle anymore. But, we wanted some more colour as we felt the black and white would not stand out enough on a shelf full of other spirits.

So we looked again at the colours of the fruits and flowers that are our flavours and took inspiration from their colour ways but made them a lot more vibrant. Here we started thinking about shapes that would visually represent the flavours. The easiest was blueberry because we knew it was like a burst of mellow flavour, then for elderflower we chose a petal to represent the floral taste. But we struggled with passion fruit because it is quite a strong tangy flavour we couldn’t think of a simple shape to represent this. In the end we chose a hexagon because we felt that it was complex enough to represent the flavour. We also added colour to the lines of the label to make it stand out from the now bright illustrations. We also tried out a gradient on the glass so that the illustrations appear out of it, however we felt that this made it too busy and complex when we wanted to keep the design simple and contemporary.

After this we decided to minimise the amount of information that we put on the labels, streamlining it so that it only contains the necessary information. We also decided that the use of the bold lines took away from the sophistication of the design so we opted with subtler tapered lines to separate the information. At this stage we also asked people to fill in some feedback forms to make sure that we were targeting the right audience. We asked people where they thought it might be sold as well as the age range and gender who would buy it. Pretty much all the results that we got back were comments saying that they would see the vodka in high end stores such as M&S or Waitrose and that they would appeal to our selected age range of 25-40 year olds with a few minor deviations from this.

So after confirming that we were moving in the right direction we continued to develop the design, refining the positioning of the illustrations and colour combinations. We added a silver sticker to the neck of the bottle to further emphasise the premium quality of the vodka, adding a seal of approval almost for the filtration process.

We also got some feedback to change the type hierachy of the labels - that the brand name should be first rather than the flavour of the vodka. This improves it quite a lot because now it reads how we wanted it to as “Oh blueberry” or “Oh passion fruit” instead of the other way around.