As a designer, any work that you undertake for yourself is always going to be heavily scrutinised. This is an expression of what you like, not what your client is directing you towards or what you need to do to make a crust. This is truly your own style, and it had best be incredible.
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I like to think that I am pretty lucky in the people that I call my clients. I know a lot of people with an incredible amount of talent, and one of those is Charlie Ainsbury. Charlie with his business partner Luke run one of the best bars in Sydney, This Must Be The Place, named Timeouts Best New Bar of the Year in 2016. Being that they are both absolutely top-shelf bartenders, they have this tendency to win awards – and there isn’t a bigger cocktail award in Australia than the World Class Cocktail Competition, which Charlie won in 2014 and again in 2016. Pretty incredible huh. I was invited by BLANK Agency, the marketing gurus for This Must Be The Place, to help design the packaging for a product that was part of the submission for this years World Class Cocktail Competition – a ready-to-pour cocktail that could be sold off the shelf. Charlie created an amazing cocktail inspired by the passion of Don Julio Gonzalez, the maker of Don Julio Tequila, which extends the cocktail flavours and experience into the meal, blurring the boundaries between wine and cocktail. Infused with vanilla, cardamon, chardonnay and star anise, this cocktail is the perfect accompaniment to food and brings out the best in a range of flavours. For the bottle design, we utilised watercolours to abstractly show the range and levels in the cocktail, from strong and rich to light and fruity. The label was designed to compete with a range of wines in the category, particularly those which are biodynamic and boutique. Wine labels are typically beautiful, with a focus on art and design elements like illustration and watercolours, and so to appeal to a similar target market and belong as a part of the category, similar inspirations were used. To accompany the cocktail, we created a booklet that was designed to educate the customers, being that this product is a completely new concept and quite innovative. This would be hung on the bottle and is full of ingredient illustrations, tasting notes and serving instructions, to make sure that each bottle of Domaine Julio is served in the way it was intended, to best appreciate the flavours. I love working with anyone who loves what they do, and the team at This Must Be The Place are exactly that. Here’s hoping that this beautiful cocktail is available on shelf sometime in the near future…
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One of the best things about my job is being able to help other creatives realise their business potential.
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“The Hills Hoist. The Backyard Clothesline. The Verandah Clothes Line. Whatever form yours takes, we want to build it for you.” Every Australian can identify with and understands the necessity of a clothesline in a backyard. However, if we are all being brutally honest, a clothesline is not a sexy home item. Its not something that people necessarily want to think about – they just want it handled when it needs to be, and be functional when your getting a little low on clean underwear. That’s where A Line Up come in. They provide a complete end to end service, from removal of your existing clothesline, to supply and installation of the new one and clean up at the end of the process. The team at A Line Up approached me for a fresh new logo design, having operated under a different business name for some time. They wanted something that highlighted the clean and simple nature of their business, while being quite literal in the kind of service that they do. The logo design does exactly that – in clean and simple line work, it specifically depicts the iconic Hills Hoist clothesline, while being slightly abstracted within the blue square. Couple this with a strong blue-toned colour palette, designed to be relaxing and calming, and you have a simple logo that really speaks to stressed-out home owners. This logo design was paired with some beautiful imagery of clotheslines and landscapes in the business cards, with each member of the A Line Up team having their own unique image, tailored to their personality. This has created a solid foundation for the way that the brand will be presented in the marketplace. The website itself needed to be a few things to really meet the client brief and client needs. It needed to be simple, so as not to overwhelm users and coordinate with the new look and feel of A Line Up. It needed to have a client-operated back end, so that information could be updated quickly and easily as needed. This was built onto a WordPress back end, which I wholeheartedly recommend to my clients for being able to quickly and easily update their websites, while also give great Google Search results with minimal interference. Line models needed to be shown, and a contact form needed to be included, for easy contact by prospective clients. Visually, the entire website was left…
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I’m so absolutely thrilled to unveil my latest and greatest website design. I was lucky enough to meet Sally from The Clever Closet Company at a lecture that I gave earlier in the year, and aside from wanting some consultations about how to manager her social media accounts, Sally was most interested right from the outset about redesigning her website.
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