Spirits · Concept · One label
The Black Sherwood Forest
— a woodland gin, emptied out
The challenge
No brief, no client — a thing I made for myself, early on, and still keep coming back to. The name set the whole tone: not the green Sherwood of the ballads, but the black one. The one after nightfall, quiet and deep.
So the label went the opposite way from every other woodland gin. Where they crowd the bottle with foliage and antlers and crests, this one empties out. Almost nothing on it. Let the quiet do the talking.
The face
One stag, engraved in fine cross-hatched line, on a wide field of bare uncoated paper. A single small bird sits on his antlers. The name runs vertical beside him, and a black panel clips the animal's hindquarters — so the stag steps half-behind the type, the way a figure sits behind calligraphy.
The line is European — old wood-engraving, the hand of Bewick and the natural-history plates. But the composition is Japanese: the animal small and pushed to one edge, the type vertical, and most of the label left empty. That emptiness isn't blank space left over — it does as much work as the mark. It's the black forest itself: still, dark, room to breathe. The type is set in a library face, chosen to stay out of the illustration's way.
Shown the way the name asks — low light, oak leaves and acorns, a hunting horn, moss and bark — so the bottle reads as something you'd find deep in the woods, not on a bright shelf.
The result
Self-initiated. No client, no brief, no print run — a concept made to push one idea as far as it goes: how much of an animal you can hide and still have people see a stag.
It stays in the portfolio for the same reason a sketchbook does. Not every drawing is a job.
Want one of these
for your own range?
Tell me what you're making and what comes after it. I'll tell you which chapter it is — and if it isn't a fit, I'll say so.