My name is Hilary Ament
and I am a senior
Graphic Design major.
During
this summer of 2014, I
was a Design intern for Stranger &
Stranger in New York
City. Stranger & Stranger is a packaging
and branding company for alcohol,
mainly wine and spirits. They started in London, and now have an
office in
NYC. They are responsible for the packaging of
the mythical Kraken, lovely
Jack Daniel's limited
bottles, Safeway's Paperboy,
a wine bottle made out
of compressed recycled paper,
among many others. They
are
known for their ornate style,
often
dark and sinister, and
quite often pulling from victorian
filigree or historic pieces.
I found out about Stranger & Stranger through various design
blogs. Throughout my junior year,
I was very interested
in lettering, victorian
design, and any type of ornamental
graphic design. I continued
to research period pieces and
experimented,
using many of Stranger's labels as inspiration.
When it came time to
apply for internships,
Stranger was my first choice. They have gorgeous designs
and I wanted the
opportunity to learn the
process of creating similar labels. I emailed
the art director, Cosimo Surace, my resume and portfolio, and
we
quickly set up a
meeting in their office. He went over the basics of what they
do, and I was shocked
to learn that they only have four designers, and
a few production designers. They not only create the brand
and label for a product, but they are able to
custom make the bottle
shape, do the glass engraving,
decide on a closure, write the copy
and words that
go on a label, and sometimes even invent
the name and flavor of the alcohol! Cosimo luckily decided it would
be a good fit, and I
was set to start in May.
Cosimo started off right away
by telling me this was not like
a normal internship, he was going to treat me
more like an employee and give
me many projects to
work
on. They work at
a very
fast pace, and unlike any process I did in school,
so it was a bit of
a shock at first.
He
would typically spend hours and hours researching,
finding specific type
references, and researching anything
that falls within the realm of
the project including images, movies, design
examples, etc. so that the project was completely set,
and they had a solid direction
to go in. They then start designing
by getting down the overall sketch down
in illustrator, and then fine-tuning it little by little. Cosimo gave me a lot
of direction to the overall picture. He
usually advised me to research more,
and not focus on small
details that
might need to be changed later. Another designer, Jaymie McAmmond
was
also very helpful in giving advice and showing
illustrator tricks.
I worked on a
variety of different
projects including researching and
starting a label from
scratch, minor changes on existing
labels, shipping containers for spirits, small
stickers for spirits, illustrations, wordmarks and
type, and even a couple of books
they are currently working on.
Almost all of
the projects I worked
on are currently confidential,
but it was exciting to have a chance to
design bits for major alcohol brands. I also got to hear about the process of designing
the existing successful
brands, and I learned
so much over the course of three months.
