Wine Label Redesign & Packaging Identity for Top Source — Washington State

The challenge was not to start again

I had already designed earlier versions of the three wine labels. They had an expressive, painterly quality and a hand-drawn character worth preserving.

The problem was an inherited brand element sitting above them: a heavy black Top Source header band with utilitarian lettering. It was highly visible, but visually disconnected from the more individual language of the labels beneath it.

So the brief became more interesting than a simple redesign. How do you improve a wine range without erasing what already gives it personality?

The answer was to preserve the expressive core and rebuild the hierarchy around it.

Brand Refresh

Removing the black band and rebuilding the Top Source identity

The first decision was to remove the dark header entirely. That immediately opened the composition and allowed the artwork and wine names to occupy the label more naturally.

I then developed a new Top Source identity built around a clean serif wordmark and a mountain silhouette associated with Washington State.

The new identity is quieter but more coherent. Instead of dominating the labels by weight and contrast, it becomes part of the range architecture. Applied in gold foil, it provides a consistent master-brand element across all three wines.

The brand stopped sitting on top of the labels and started belonging to them.

Hand-drawn identities for Walla Walla and Columbia Valley

Each wine received its own handwritten treatment and painterly solar motif. These are small elements, but they carry much of the personality of the range.

Walla Walla Valley Syrah uses a warmer red register and a freer looping wordmark. Columbia Valley Syrah-Grenache moves into cooler blues with a broad horizontal brushstroke. Columbia Valley Sauvignon Blanc becomes brighter and more open, centred on a vivid yellow-orange sun.

The wines therefore share a visual grammar without becoming three colour-swapped versions of the same label.

Wine label redesign is often an exercise in editing

Redesign work is different from starting with a blank sheet. The first task is to determine what should survive.

In this case, the hand-drawn language already had value. It was individual, expressive and recognisably different from more conventional wine packaging. Replacing it would have solved the wrong problem.

The real weakness was the hierarchy around it. By removing the heavy inherited header, creating a master brand with more appropriate visual weight and refining the individual wine identities, the existing strengths could become much clearer.

This is often the more useful form of redesign: not inventing a completely different product, but making the existing one finally feel coherent.

Designed for recognition without forcing uniformity

Wine shelves are crowded. A range therefore needs two things that can easily work against one another: family recognition and individual bottle character.

The new Top Source system balances those demands through three levels:

• a consistent master brand in gold;
• individual hand-drawn wine names and motifs;
• a shared label architecture that keeps the range visually connected.

The goal was not simply to make the packaging look more expensive. It was to make it feel more intentional — clearer in hierarchy, more coherent as a range and more faithful to the individual character already present in the wines.