Experimental Wine Label Design Project

Wine Label Experiment : A Virtual Prototype.

This is an experiment in the design, visualisation and rapid virtual prototyping of packaging and labeling for a new product. Looking for an excuse to play around with some new 3D textures, and having a desire to design some drinks packaging at some stage for real, we decided to produce a virtual prototype for a fictitious Italian wine company that produces a fortified fruit wine in a range of flavours. We picked the name 'fruitalio' out of the air for the purposes of this exercise and it bears no relation to any other fruit wines of that name (if they should happen to exist).

The Label Design

In a commercial project we would typically produce a range of prototypes with the client, choosing favourites to develop further until one is chosen for the final product.

For the purposes of this experiment we quickly produced a single and rather simple label (fig.1)

The green strips to the left and right are where the product information is to be added. These have been intentionally left blank to provide an opportunity to make adjustments to the product being developed at later stages of the prototyping process.

Figure 1.1 shows a closeup of an area of the label, better illustrating the impressionist pastel style that is used. This artistic rendition of the grapes gives the label a classic feel that will contrast and compliment the modern bottle design and texturing that will come later.

Figure 1: A simple label design

Figure 1.1 A close up of the impressionist style

3D Visualisations

Visualising the product in three dimensions in its natural setting is a useful way to test the designs effectiveness. We quickly created a simple model of the bottle that is to feature the label, and constructed a scene around it to allow it to be viewed in context from any angle. This gives the client a feel for how the finished product might appear.

Figure 2

Product Range Prototypes

The initial prototype is modified to represent possible colours for the full range of wines as shown in figure 3. The flavours are: Blueberry, Raspberry, Peach and Lemon.

Bottle Texture

A close-up is provided of the suggested bottle texturing (fig.4). We chose a bumpy texture that refracts the light of the fridge it's to be sold in, making this wine stand out amongst its competitors on the shelf and giving it a refreshing modern feel.

This prototype can be developed further at a later stage for the production of advertising materials or animations and the scene can be reused as a future setting for other products.

Figure 3

Animated 3D Visualisation : The Fly Around

We created a three dimensional fly-around animation that allows us to better visualise the product and its dimensions. The scene is lit to visualise and examine the reflective properties we were looking for in the glass texture.

Further tweaks and modifications of the bottle design are now possible enabling rapid production of further prototypes in the 3 dimensional scene if required.