'09 Wine Label: Secret Cellars

As some of you no doubt know, in addition to illustration and design, I also make my own wine. Which, of course, means that I get to design the labels too. Some of my earlier labels are featured elsewhere on this blog and on my portfolio website. But, I thought I'd share this years label, for the 2009 Secret Cellars Syrah.



The "secret cellars" is a reference to the wine-making room that my dad and I have been building in the back of mine and Sarah's detached garage. It's still a work in progress, but we are happy with how its coming along. The owl is a plastic barn owl, which we've been using as our unofficial mascot since we started making wine in my dad's basement. The wood texture is from one of the walls of the room.

And, for good measure, here's a photo of the whole "family" featuring (from left to right): 2006 Round the World Red, 2007 Ranger Rick Red, 2008 Stella Rose's Stellar Red and the previously mentioned Secret Cellars.

IT Icons

Client: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Project Description: Update existing set of Internal Technology icons to better match the current foundation brand guidelines. This included changing the illustration style, color scheme, general clarity and creating several new icons.

GCE Grant Map

Client The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Project Description: Informational graphic displaying the distribution of grants given out for the foundation's Grand Challenges Exploration initiative.

Happy Holidays 2007

Client: Personal
Project Description: The Happy Holiday's card I made for my wife and I to give out this year. I deliberately tried to do something a little different than wat I did the previous two years.

Quilt Pattern Clean Up (before and after)

Client: SuSun Designs
Project Description: The quilt pattern designer provided me with hand drawn diagrams laying out the overall arrangement and dimensions of her pattern. I was then tasked with cleaning up the designs, and reconstructing them in a vector format for the final pattern booklet.

General Theory of Creativity

Clinet: Personal
Project Description: Personal design and illustration portfolio website: GeneralTheoryofCreativity.com.

`Round the World Red

Client: `Round the World Red Wine
Project Description: Wine label design for small family-made wine group. Plane, globe and clouds are from different images, collaged together and recolored.

Zumiez Couch Tour

Client: Zumiez
Project Description:
Working with a designer from Zumiez, and drawing upon the color scheme and designs of vintage postcards, we created a double page ad promoting the "Zumiez 2003 Couch Tour" - a tour of famous skateboarders and snowboarders that would visit six cities in the United States. This ad appeared in a number of major skateboarding and snowboarding magazines, and elements of it were translated into everything from T-shirts and visors to posters and ID badges.

In this project, I worked primarily as the illustrator, but also help with conceptualizing and layout.

Wedding Invites, Programs and Save the Day cards

Client: Personal
Project Description: One of the more pleasurable I've had the honor to work on was designing the Invitations, Programs and Save the Day cards for my wedding to my lovely wife, Sarah. Using the green, orange and off-white color scheme we had chosen, I developed a series of cards, invitations and programs which was both sophisticated andfun. The grand finale was definitely the program which featured a crossword puzzle and actvities page.


Beyond designing the programs and other print portions of our wedding, I worked with my wife to carry the same colors and feel through the rest of our wedding occasion. If you are interested, you can see photos here.

Real.com Redesign

Client: RealNetworks
Project Description:
Working with a layout developed by another member of my design team, I was charged with implementing the new layout to be tested on Real.com. My job was to take the template and fill the various modules with content and design to make it better match the existing offers on the live version of the page. This page would then be tested against the current live page.

Rhapsody ads for TWICE Magazine

Client: RealNetworks
Project Description:
A copywriter and I were charged with creating a full page print ad for the technology industry magazine TWICE. With only several days to turn the project around, we had to create an ad that encouraged other companies to look into partnering opportunities with RealNetworks' Rhapsody technology. Of the many options that the copywriter and I explored was this personal favorite which was determined to be too "quirky."


The final ad, which appeared in TWICE magazine, was this elegant solution in which we combined a Yin-Yang motif with the Rhapsody play button, logo and the popular Sansa player which was recently released in partnership with RealNetworks.