Labels are an interesting challenge. You not only have to fit all the design components and product information within a limited amount of space, you also have to make sure the label looks good when wrapped on a three-dimensional object. (This can be a bit tricky with curved surfaces, since you don't want crucial information to "disappear around the bend" in a product shot.)

While I'd done a few label projects for various products that appear in my multimedia novel, I didn't get a chance to work on a big commercial project until August of 2006. That month, PINES International decided to move forward on bringing their new Green Energy capsules to market, and I was given the task of not only coming up with a label for a new product, but also making sure that the basic design would also work across the entire line of PINES products. (Since Green Energy was going to feature a redesigned PINES logo, it was assumed that the rest of the line would eventually be switched over to this "new look" as well.)

In total, over two hundred separate drafts were prepared for the company, ranging from minor variations on existing labels to radically different approaches that made full use of the agricultural shots I'd taken for PINES.

After a month and a half of testing out options and churning out drafts, PINES finally selected four different labels to serve as the basis for mock-ups of the entire line of PINES products. These four series where then laser-printed, wrapped on bottles, and put on display at PINES' headquarters, allowing the owners and other members of the PINES team to weigh in on which approach they liked best -- although it was eventually decided that I should combine aspects of two of the approaches in order to produce a "hybrid" version, and it was this version that ultimately gave rise to the final label.

As of May, 2007, only the new Green Energy label has gone to the printers; it should be appearing on store shelves sometime later this summer.

Click on the links below for an inside look at the development process.