The Novice Expert
Dedicated to educating the consumer, The Novice Expert was born to equip the inexperienced buyer with the ‘correct’ wine-to-meat pairings. It is no secret the fraternity surrounding wine culture is almost impossible to infiltrate as knowledge and prestige are often mutually exclusive. Even in areas marketed for education, such as wine tastings, those who come up dry when asked to recite the wine’s notes and descriptors are often dismissed and left feeling excluded.
To successfully integrate into this community as an amateur, unnoticed, the bottles were designed using thermochromic technology to reveal and conceal the animal shapes within the inkblots on the bottle’s label. When picking the wines for this line, I chose both white and red options that were best served chilled. Therefore, when the bottle is waiting to be purchased, at room temperature, the fish, chicken or cow will be visible to the buyer; however, when the bottle is chilled, the animals, once colored, will change to black, becoming invisible to those who are unaware of the mission.
The Greek inspired typography was designed to evoke a foreboding sense of importance and aristocracy.
Intrigued by the sophisticated, elegant, and mysterious energy that seems to ooze from this traditioned class, I wanted to ensure my design choices felt as eternal and well crafted as the group itself. For this, I choose a thick dark glass for all three bottles with torn linen paper to allude to the moody yet clean cut attitude many attribute to ‘old money’ and ‘upper class’ society.
Additionally, I created a system using the ‘O’ in the Novice Expert logo, by adding the key shaped icon to various places including the stem of the bottle, the metal cover protecting the cork under the wax seal and of course in the logo itself. The key shape on the bottle’s stem in addition to a variation of the Novice Expert logo have been embossed on the bottle itself to create an everlasting imprint on the product, beyond just the label.
