Style combination · Contrasts

DTC 'Blanding' × Natural Wine Label Art

Blanding sells a frictionless, agency-made brand in lowercase geometric sans and pastels; the natural wine label sells a person through an untrained drawing. Use the contrast to decide whether a product should feel designed or made.

From the research on Natural Wine Label Art

Mix them and make something DTC 'Blanding' Natural Wine Label Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Natural Wine Label Art, their arrangement from DTC 'Blanding', the finish from Natural Wine Label Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Natural Wine Label Art

Type from DTC 'Blanding': Geometric sans
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from DTC 'Blanding': Pastel
Flat fields
Form from Natural Wine Label Art: Stylised figuration
Ornament-free
Composition from DTC 'Blanding': Isolated object
Generous white space
Surface from Natural Wine Label Art

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · DTC 'Blanding'

Kin

Hanken Grotesk, standing in for Circular (Laurenz Brunner, Lineto, 2013)

Text · Natural Wine Label Art

The labels of the natural (low-intervention) wine scene, which grew from Beaujolais into a worldwide network of small growers, bars and importers. Where the classic label ranks château, appellation and vintage in formal type around a crest or an engraved estate, these give the front to one hand-made picture: a cartoon animal, a crayon or child's drawing, a doodle or a line portrait, with the cuvée name scrawled by hand and the place played down. Each cuvée often gets its own picture, drawn by the grower, their children, friends or a studio that keeps the naive hand.

Caveat; Natural Wine Label Art used Hand-scrawled cuvée names in felt pen, crayon or pencil, written by the same hand as the picture and Cartoonist's hand-lettering drawn into the scene, as in Michel Tolmer's comics and drawings for the French vin naturel scene

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from DTC 'Blanding', with a counter-accent from Natural Wine Label Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Natural Wine Label Art

#faf7f2 ground · 36%
#2b2b2b ink · 14%
#d27c5d accent · 18%
#f4cfc8 accent · 14%
#3f6db3 accent · 10%
#a9b8a1 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #faf7f2;
  --ink: #2b2b2b;
  --accent-1: #d27c5d;
  --accent-2: #f4cfc8;
  --accent-3: #3f6db3;
  --accent-4: #a9b8a1;
  --font-display: "Hanken Grotesk", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Caveat", cursive;
}

Use it with care

Natural Wine Label Art: Gut Oggau's family of faces, Jaime Hayón's drawings for it, Jauma's Tikka the Cosmic Cat and Michel Tolmer's characters are owned artwork: invent your own character, do not prompt an image model for a named illustrator's hand, and never present a generated image as a real grower's label. 'Natural' has no legal definition for wine, and French rules even forbid tying the words 'nature' or 'naturel' directly to 'vin'; the Vin Méthode Nature logo is a private mark for growers who sign its charter (validated by the DGCCRF in March 2020), so do not put it on a design for a wine that is not certified. Keeping the legal mentions quiet must not mean leaving out the label's mandatory particulars.