Style combination · Pairs well
Natural Wine Label Art × Yuru-chara
Super Glou's drunken-cat mascot and Jauma's cosmic cat work like local mascots; borrow the yuru-chara habit of one soft, recurring character who appears in a new scene for each product.
Mix them and make something Natural Wine Label Art Yuru-chara
01
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.
Natural Wine Label Art Yuru-chara (Japanese Local Mascot Design)
- Type from Natural Wine Label Art
- Colour from Yuru-chara
- Form from Yuru-chara
- Composition from Natural Wine Label Art
- Surface from Natural Wine Label Art
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02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Natural Wine Label Art
Pop
Caveat, standing in for Hand-scrawled cuvée names in felt pen, crayon or pencil, written by the same hand as the picture (the 'grocery store list doodles' AIGA Eye on Design describes)
Text · Yuru-chara
Japan's local mascots: characters commissioned by prefectures, towns and tourism bodies to stand for a place, named yuru-kyara ('loose characters') by the illustrator Jun Miura around 2000. Each body is built from a local product, landmark or legend, such as Hikonyan's samurai helmet or Barysan's towel belly band, drawn as one frontal figure with a big head and a few flat colours, and lived out as a walk-about costume. Hikonyan (2007) set off the boom; Kumamon (2010), licensed free for goods that promote Kumamoto, made it an industry.
Zen Maru Gothic; Yuru-chara used Hand-drawn kana name lettering in thick, rounded strokes set beside the figure, spelling the mascot's name in hiragana or katakana, as in くまモン, ひこにゃん or バリィさん and Maru gothic (rounded gothic) Japanese type, such as Morisawa's Shin Maru Go, for captions, event banners and goods
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Yuru-chara, with a counter-accent from Natural Wine Label Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Natural Wine Label Art Yuru-chara (Japanese Local Mascot Design)
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#fbf8efground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#ffd23faccent · 18% -
#f08a3caccent · 14% -
#e3242baccent · 10% -
#3f6db3accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbf8ef;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #ffd23f;
--accent-2: #f08a3c;
--accent-3: #e3242b;
--accent-4: #3f6db3;
--font-display: "Caveat", cursive;
--font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}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.
Yuru-chara (Japanese Local Mascot Design): Mascots are owned designs: Kumamon's copyright is held by Kumamoto Prefecture, which allows free use in Japan only with its permission and a displayed permit number, and Hikone and Hikonyan's illustrator fought over the character's rights from 2007 through mediation, a 2011 court ruling and a 2012 settlement, so invent an original character for each place and agree rights with the illustrator first. Keep sacred figures out of the joke: Buddhist groups in Nara objected that Sento-kun, a Buddha-like child with deer antlers, insulted the Buddha. And do not use a cute mascot to soften a contested public risk, as with the tritium mascot that Japan's Reconstruction Agency made to promote releasing treated water from Fukushima, pulled a day after its release in April 2021.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Natural Wine Label Art
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Contrasts · 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.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Both come from the same small-batch maker economy and share a naive drawn idiom; print a short-run cuvée label in two riso inks to add overprint and grain to a felt-pen drawing.
- European Heraldry Contrasts · The crest is the device of the classic château label that natural wine replaced with a face or an animal; put one heraldic charge beside a doodle to show which side of the wine world a bottle stands on.
- French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) Pairs well · Both put one cartoon figure on a plain ground with the name drawn into the picture; the gag poster is a professional's single punchline at hoarding scale, the wine label an amateur's picture at bottle scale. Borrow Savignac's one-image-one-idea discipline to keep a naive label from turning into a scrapbook.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · The craft boom's centred one-ink badge with an 'Est.' date borrows exactly the heritage authority natural wine turns down; set a crayon animal against a stamped roundel to choose between a new firm dressed as an old one and a grower who signs with a drawing.
With Yuru-chara
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Contrasts · Postwar Japanese identities give institutions abstract, grid-built marks; a yuru-chara gives a prefecture a face, a name and a body that walks into festivals and shakes hands.
- Kamon (Japanese Family Crests) Pairs well · Borrow the place's own heraldry, a daimyō family crest or the town's emblem: a flat crest on the mascot's sash, banner or packaging anchors the loose figure in local history, as Hikonyan's helmet anchors it in the Ii family's red armour.
- Kawaii Design Contrasts · Both build on rounded, big-headed cute figures, but kawaii sells polished pastel fancy goods for private pleasure, while a yuru-chara speaks for a town in a few bold colours and keeps its awkwardness.
- Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Contrasts · Newtro reissues a firm's own decades-old mascot, polished; a yuru-chara is newly invented for a place and its looseness is left in.
- Superflat Contrasts · Superflat turns Japanese character culture into gallery irony, crowded and cute-grotesque; yuru-chara keeps characters sincere, civic and plain, one figure at a time.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Corporate Memphis draws faceless, placeless figures for global platforms; a yuru-chara is a single named character built from one town's products and legends.
- Front-of-Pack Warning Octagons (Latin American Food Warning Seals) Contrasts · Mascot design is exactly what a sealed pack must give up in Chile and Mexico; put the two side by side to show how much of a snack's appeal is carried by a character.
- Rubber-Hose Revival (Cartoon Mascot Graphics) Pairs well · Both build a mascot from the thing it promotes; borrow the yuru-chara's costume-ready frontal figure and licensing for a rubber-hose brand character.