What thoughts and quandaries did you have to deal with in designing your label(s)?
Do you have a “design” on your label? If so, why? Is there a story behind your label?
What about color scheme? Font? Size of the font? Size of the label?
In designing a label, to what extent did you consider what would likely go through prospective buyers’ minds when looking at a bottle of your wine? – what were these thoughts? Or, did you merely design a label that you personally liked?
I know there’s a bunch of rules and regulations that must be followed, as well, and I’m curious how these rules/regulations affected what you wanted to do with the aforementioned aspects of your label.
Interesting article, Randy. Thanks for posting the link. From my personal standpoint, I really like the label you ultimately chose. My runner-up preference is probably the label with the two card pics above “Match” (the image appearing to the left of the “M” with two faces and a brown background).
Brian, I’d been meaning to post to this thread. Sorry for the delay. I don’t know if you have a specific interest or question about the label design process, so I will just give you some general comments.
Here’s what we did:
We walked through a lot of stores looking at labels, photographing labels, and even bought some bottles that had labels we liked.
We chose a graphic designer who did work we admired and POSSIBLY EVEN MORE IMPORTANT, seemed easy to work with. In choosing a designer of anything, if they are temperamental and won’t listen to you, it makes the process painful.
We spent a long time talking with the designer and our winemaker. The designer got to know us and our story. We also discussed existing label examples and what we liked or didn’t about them. We discussed the logistics and cost associated with different labels. More color, odd shapes, multipiece labels, etc all add costs. Out of these discussions came various design directions. Match, my wife’s last name derives from the Russian word for sword. We own a painting by Gaylord Soli which we love. His “faces” imagery was romantic and again played with the multiple meanings of the word Match. Antique playing cards, some of them Russian was another direction. Then there is the story of the naming of the vineyard and creation of a Butterdragon. That took several directions. We are big fans of Marc Chagal. The designer did a prototype painting in the Chagal style of us flying over the vineyard with butterflies and dragonflies. (When one visits us at Butterdragon, they see this painting prototype.) She also did a dragonfly in the style of Berkeley poster artist David Lance Goines. The design we ultimately chose was the last one we saw. In fact, we were very close to finalizing when the designer came up with the new and winning concept. She hesitated showing us as we were so close and didn’t want to muddy the waters.
As each of the various design concepts were created, we would print them in color and tape them to bottles of two buck chuck and live with them awhile, just keeping them out around the house and seeing how they looked and felt from various angles and distances. We all, as wine collectors know that what is most important is what is in the bottle, but you do want it to be attractive. You want it to be distinctive not just on your table, but it should look good to the diners at the table next to you. And although the vast majority of our wine is not sold from a store shelf, I do know that a distributor from a state where we have done very well first gave our wine a taste because the label was so distinctive.
Once we had the design with color choices, the frustrating part began. Being a small winery means that all of your label runs will be small. That doesn’t carry much weight with the printer so getting them to really try hard on the registration and color was tough. We found that many of the things we wanted to do such as embossing, and overstrike wouldn’t work on a design that had the different colors that had to be printed in a certain order. Heck, I still don’t understand all the issues but basically the printing came down to compromises on what we could achieve in a realistic or economical way. We were going for the blue dragonfly wings to have an oily, translucent sheen of a real dragonfly and although the label looks really good, I don’t think we ever got there. By the way, the effect we did get is a result of the label being printed on silver paper.
The total design process took about $15k which did not include any of the printing. However, that was fairly reasonable as far as label design of this caliber and effort.
Anway, a rather long winded post. Feel free to ask or PM anything specific.
Randy, I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank you for the links and such an informative post. This should be required reading for label development 101 (or maybe even 201). Nice job.
Brian, whatever it is, just make sure it’s “yours.” Especially when it comes to print. Be there for every step of the process, and don’t let anything move forward until you approve it (printing esp.)
As far as TTB, well…just hope for the person with the least amount of problems that day your label request comes through.
wow! very interesting post, Randy … thank you for posting.
I do want to make it clear that I’m not ITB … so perhaps I should be slapped on the wrist for any posts that made it seem otherwise … I posted the OP because I am interested (intensely curious, but nothing else) in the “consumer manipulation” aspect of wine packaging, specifically labels. I know many labels were not designed with any thought towards consumer manipulation, but OTOH I know many are … and perhaps “manipulation” isn’t exactly the word I’m looking for, but hopefully ya’ll know what I mean.
Anybody else who feels comfortable sharing their thought processes behind label design and execution, please do! This is but a small window into the human mind.
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