BRIGADE Kicks Off 2017 With Award-Winning Design
Awards certainly aren’t everything, but they do offer a unique opportunity for our team to look back and celebrate some of the amazing work we’ve done. In the past three months alone, we’ve had three such opportunities.
Our work with Black Box Premium Wines, Serpent’s Bite Whisky, and Vertical Water each brought challenges and triumphs – and we’re proud to have the finished products praised by renowned publications and institutions in the design community.
Most recently, BRIGADE designed a limited-edition Halloween sleeve for Black Box Premium Wines. The goal was to celebrate the Halloween season with Black Box Premium Wines, but with a more sophisticated and “grown-up” approach that would resonate with the brand’s core audience.
BRIGADE hand-illustrated a haunted house scene that wraps around the box, creating an illusion of depth and transforming the box into a stage for storytelling. The artwork leverages white inks and spot UVs, bringing the scene to life using details like a broken fence, full moon, and tombstones. Custom copy suggested a game to play with guests, and a tagline “Serves-20-Ghoulish-Guests” completed a sleeve that put Black Box at the center of Halloween festivities.
The Halloween sleeve proved to be a great success for the brand. With a photo-realistic illustration style and original copy, the box was successful in celebrating this increasingly adult occasion while maintaining Black Box’s brand recognition and taking its packaging to the next level. This limited-edition sleeve won an American Package Design award from Graphic Design USA – the latest in an early wave of awards for our agency in 2017.
Last year, BRIGADE created a striking point-of-sale program for the fledgling whisky brand, Serpent’s Bite. The collateral focused on a heroic key visual that would work to bring the brand’s serpent to life.
As a “badass” whisky centered around the shot ritual, the tone of our original imagery was moody, dark, and masculine. We wanted it to feel as though the brand’s serpent had come to life to protect the bottle and the whisky’s key ingredient: an apple.
With a concept and sketch in hand, we combined forces with our favorite 3D renderer and spent months studying snake anatomy, rendering apples, and photographing textures to ultimately create this award-winning key visual. The result is a breathtaking image that brings the brand to life across mediums, including the poster that won Silver in the prestigious 2017 Graphis Design Annual.
As part of a brand refresh project around the same time, our team created an awesome new packaging design for Vertical Water – an innovative maple water on a mission to preserve U.S. forestland. The goal was to create a brand look and language that would capture Vertical Water’s mission and help the product stand out in the natural water category.
BRIGADE finessed the Vertical Water story, rebranded the mission in a way that felt more compelling and genuine, and seamlessly incorporated it into the new packaging.
The result was a package design that brilliantly told the company’s story while still making consumers crave the crisp taste of maple water. The design won BRIGADE a Merit award in the 2017 Graphis Design Annual and was previously featured in The Dieline.
Learn more about our work here.
