Mission Wine Collection

The annual collection features wines from various alumni vintners and is repackaged and sold to benefit SCU’s Alumni Association.

Challenge

The annual Mission Wine Collection had outdated artwork and typography, and I was tasked with refreshing the collection’s aesthetic.

Until now, the design had always featured a photograph or drawing of the campus’s historic Mission Church, but I felt it needed a different take to be a true refresh.

The pitch

While researching the history of the University, I thought about the double meaning of the University’s “mission” – one being a physical place, and one being a set of values and goals.

For my pitch, I decided to elevate three “mission” values that would translate well into custom artwork in the style of the University’s current visual campaign:

Education
Community
Faith

I knew I wanted to illustrate two new pieces for the project, and my pitch was ultimately approved to move forward.

Brainstorming

I collected and photographed lots of stained glass examples, from historic to today
I strolled through wine aisles and captured examples of different types of glass printing methods, from die cut labels to screen printing

Creating the illustrations

I drew two new custom illustrations for the collection first, representing the University’s mission values of Community (hands, left) and Education (books, right) that continued the tradition of the collection but lent new life to its meaning. Modeling them off of the Campaign’s stained glass style line drawings, I sketched the basic hand and books in pencil, then embellished them in illustrator to make a composition.

With a larger budget…

I would have loved to have screen printed directly onto the bottles like I had seen in stores, or even printed them with embossing to raise the pattern into a tactile experience. Below is a mockup of my vision for labels with screen printing.

Solution

As can be the case with university projects, I was ultimately very limited on paper stock, label size and techniques to stay within the deadline and budget. I designed all of the labels and did a spot gloss on the patterns instead for a little extra punch.

Below is the whole collection, using two other illustrations from the campaign for the oil and pinot grigio labels, and my two custom ones for the mescolanza and cabernet.