Rum Blender
Journey collection
Created at Front Page, with Lisa Adamson, Laura Service and Emma Fraser
The challenge was to create a limited-edition rum collection that told the story of Rum Blender, a side project I had recently started with a friend.
It all kicked off one evening after hours, with a group of us gathered around a boardroom table, learning a thing or two about rum (how it's made, the different styles, what Rum Blender was trying to be) and, inevitably, tasting our way through a flight of seven different rums. There were tasting notes, opinions, scribbles, and by the end of the session, three original blends had emerged to take forward. There were also a number of us who were fairly drunk.
Fast-forward seven months of lunch breaks, early starts, and incremental progress, and we finally signed off the creative to send away for engraving. The concept was to show the journey the rum takes, from where it's made to where it's blended to where it's bottled, in three simple, stylised illustrations.
The first captured a sun-soaked Caribbean island in the West Indies. The second referenced the narrow canal-side buildings of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The final depicted Bothwell Castle in Scotland. While three different designers worked on the illustrations individually, they were all built on a single, shared grid system we developed to ensure consistency of style, weight, and rhythm across the set.
I'm really proud of this one, but the best part wasn't the finished bottles. It was working so closely with people who brought even more energy and enthusiasm to it than I did. Three good-looking bottles of rum, and a team who were all rightly proud of them.
