This project began as a phone call to the company owner after I was recommended through a mutual friend. We then began working together, I was given a brief of his ideas and layout to work from with the main theme being Christmas discounts, and to be displayed in a visually appealing way.

I put some research in the field, finding some fun stock images of wine glasses, as well as a very high quality image of mulled wine in a Christmas theme which was perfect for the cover. However the image was landscape and as such I edited it together with another image to create a coherent front cover.

The owner also gave me a few places to find specific wine brands online, as well as on his own website of course. I also was given a friend of his offer booklet as a base point. The final piece of research was looking at commercial magazines in other fields as well as for wine specifically for interesting way to layout the products.

I started the work from a word document which outlined the header and tagline, but more importantly each wine names, details, and prices.

Something I noticed quite quickly was that there was on;y 5 pages listed in the document, which for print a booklet needs to be a multiple of four to be able to be printable. As such I expanded the page number to 6 and added a cover and back cover to be able to be go to the print.

I took some creative liberties but was really appreciated by the owner in the way I decided to layout certain times, such as the gin selection. As coming from a wine merchant there was much less products. In his document he’d wrote what to serve each with. I took the opportunity to layout the bottles along side the relevant fruit to really give that page it’s own style.

I still decided to keep each page mainly white for simplicity, with deep red accents for the obvious association with red wine. The company doesn’t have fully established branding in terms of colour, so I decided to keep it bold and simple. This is seen in how I used their logo which was originally grey and orange which I changed to all white to fit in the Christmas theme but also just shows how a simple but effect brand can work in different places.

The glasses of wine splashing I really love as it makes the page spread again stand out on it’s own. It also fits with the page items being the new world wines opposed to the standard countries known for their wine. This new world idea i took on with the bold imagery, which also functioned practically to spread the pages to fit the 6 page requirement.

Overall I really enjoyed this project, it gave me a lot of room to flex my creativity and work with another great business in an era I’m vastly growing in experience.

Thanks again for reading!