Recently we had the honour to begin to assist the philosopher king behind Earth Fresh Foods (Formerly MacKay & Hughes) in realizing his dream that his growing potato and produce company could become more environmentally sustainable and educate the market place that local, healthy food production can work.

Though early in the process, our initial work has included a rebrand at the message and visual communication level covering materials from stationary, food supply sales support, through to their trade show booth which, amazingly won best inline booth at Canada’s National CPMA in Vancouver.

A great start for an amazing company. More to come as we begin the steps toward web and package.

Insite and Five Rows Craft Wine win Silver in the Best Label category at the recent  Ontario Wine Awards held in June in Toronto. This category of award was voted on by consumers and industry which makes it especially exciting to us!

June 7, 2010

Earth Fresh Foods trade show booth wins best inline booth at the recent CPMA National show in Vancouver.

June 1, 2010

Vice Vodka Icewine Martini wins Silver and Bronze for mixed spirit and packaging at the San Francisco World Spirit competition!  http://www.sfspiritscomp.com/

May, 2010

Three Insite packages — Vineland Reserve, Vineland Classic and Five Rows of Lowrey Vineyards are nominated for awards in the Ontario Wine Awards held in June in Toronto.

The Good Earth Food & Wine Co.

For more information, jump to Good Earth Food and Wine Co. project page.

Visit: http://www.goodearthfoodandwine.com/

The Good Earth Food & Wine Co.

Truly the health of a wine region is measured by what exists in the spaces between the vines. Niagara has a very healthy and quickly growing region thanks to pioneers in food and experience culture like Nicolette Novak of the Good Earth Cooking School located in the Beamsville Ontario tender fruit belt and respected viticultural area.

After a successful 15 or so years of creating and building one of the regions most exciting farm to table cooking experiences, Nicolette was itchy to throw her hat into the wine arena. With the delicate urging of her peers including Ed Madronich of famed Flat Rock Cellars in Jordan, Nicolette was convinced to go for it in a brand perspective and approached us to look at repositioning her well know identity while also coming up with brand extensions for her wine and food packaging.

This would be no small feat as most wineries have difficulty extending their brands into bigger picture ideas and alternatively, the big ideas have challenges when getting down to the business of presenting ideas across many mediums and executions.

The Insite team sketched many possibilities and settled on a scheme of a traditional palette of custom illustrations, textures and graphic stamp like elements that could be rearranged in any manner to create simply beautiful expressions of Nicolette’s thoughts, not unlike an old stationary box full of textures and clippings.

All executions could serve multiple purposes; jam bottle labels could fit any bottle, the logo was designed to translate into a rubber stamp to be applied to papers and wrapping, the stationary could be used for notes, post cards, invitations and so on in order to maximize function and minimize costs.

The end result is a rich fabric of colour and texture that tells the story of what to expect from the dynamic Nicolette and her team of wonderfully talented chef’s and winemakers.

Package shots to come.

David Milne Design — Blog Design and Development

Insite just redefined blog with the newly launched http://www.dmdltd.com — a supercharged WordPress blog for one of North America’s hottest retail design studios located in Toronto. DMD designs interiors and retail solutions for some of the world’s biggest retail brands like Nike, Victoria Secret, T-Mobile and on…

The site is designed to allow DMD to tell the story of their work while educating the viewer about what happens inside the project and behind the scenes of a great design house. The design utilizes blog posts in a forward thinking, relational manner similar to that of e-commerce shopping websites’ “If you like this, then you’ll like this” — but in story telling if you know what I mean.

The entire site is built in WordPress allowing the DMD staff to administer and add content on the fly.

Andrew Peller Limited — Winemaker’s Challenge Wine Club

Insite was asked to assist APL’s fearless wine club manager in designing a new client experience around wine. One part online, one part tactile interaction and 2 parts wine with wine personalities — this is not your usual wine club offering. The club has now launched in it’s tease phase and will roll out as the spring approaches.

To reflect the personality of the wine people behind the club, as well as the tactile components of the experience, we based the design on the exciting relationship people have with paper stationary and scrap books. The wine personalities engaged in the club were all illustrated in house to add a dimension of celebrity and tradition. More to come.

Recently Insite was asked to redesign the Reserve package to be better reflective of its legacy and support its reputation as one of Canada’s most esteemed wines moving forward. It was decided early in the project that a very simple communication was needed and that the wine could do the work. Consequently we worked with subdued metalized paper and textures contrasted with bold and striking embossed type and details. The result is confident and quiet, making no more noise than to say, “yah, you know what’s in here — perfection”.

The Outside World

We’ve got to admit that despite the fact that we never enter award programs for our work, it’s a little flattering to come across our work online or in articles. Well, more than flattering really. You see, to us, seeing our hard work understood and appreciated by our peers or more so by those that are meant to experience our communications and products means we’re doing something right. So in many ways, this is our homage to the awards program – awards of recognition handed out by the audience outside our little studio.

Here’s an incomplete list of links to popular design blogs, ubiquitous top 25 design lists and articles we’ve found that, found us:

Whole Identity Design

http://graphic-exchange.com/archives/03identity_23.htm

http://www.logochief.com/blog/tag/insite-design/

Package Design

http://graphic-exchange.com/07packaging.htm

http://graphic-exchange.com/exellence/wine.htm

http://www.designer-daily.com/25-brilliant-wine-label-bottle-package-designs-1808

http://lovelypackage.com/the-good-earth-food-wine-co/#more-13828

http://lovelypackage.com/sibling-rivalry/

http://lovelypackage.com/vice-vodka-icewine-martini/

http://lovelypackage.com/cuvee-catharine-rose-brut-sparkling-wine/

http://lovelypackage.com/five-rows-craft-wine/

http://popsop.com/5821

http://www.seriousaboutwine.co.za/?p=2185

http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2009/03/sibling-rivalry-wine.html

http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2009/01/henry-of-pelham-cuv%C3%A9e-catharine-ros%C3%A9-brut.html

http://www.canadiandesignresource.ca/officialgallery/packaging/sibling-rivalry-brand-and-package-design/

Web Design

http://webtoolkit4.me/2009/08/15/inspiration-web-design-trends-in-2009-and-probably-2010/

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/design-trends-predictions-in-2010/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/03/captivating-winery-websites-for-your-inspiration/

http://sarahlynndesign.com/2009/09/5-successful-business-website-designs-their-designers/

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/01/11/importance-of-great-web-typography-excellent-examples/

http://designshack.co.uk/gallery/colour/882222/

http://101bestwebsites.com/url/www.bertoldis.ca/

http://siteinspire.net/showcase/view/sibling_rivalry

http://siteinspire.net/showcase/category/theme/food_and_drink

http://spyrestudios.com/35-amazing-paper-made-website-designs/

http://cssmania.com/galleries/2009/05/05/fiverows.php

http://www.mivamerchant.com/galleria/archive.mv

Print Design

http://graphic-exchange.com/02print.htm

Vice Vodka Icewine Martini was launched in the late summer of 2009 with immediate success and international interest. Being the first of its kind in the world and carving out a new category as a serious Icewine blend in the Canadian market, made it a natural to draw attention. Consequently the first phase of online communication took the form of a brand image presentation, which we produced for Vineland Estate Winery, the parent company and founder of Vice. The creative closely followed the brand image, package and essence that we had created with the goal to further define the soul of Vice.

Now that the new brand has moved through a very successful autumn and holiday sales cycle, gathering significant distribution and retail listings in the LCBO, it’s time for the brand to shift to a more communicative phase of its life. Hence Insite has designed and programmed a new website based on a blog platform.

This new communication tool allows the brand managers to communicate in a quick and efficient manner to a broad audience at a responsible content management cost. The blog based platform gives the communication teams the flexibility to make constant changes to the site without the need for programming changes. Furthermore the programming is optimized to take advantage of current search engine optimization best practices as well as easy integration with social media platforms and strategies. All this without compromising the brand impact.

In addition to the web, Vice is continuing to build on the social media aspect that began at launch with attention to communicating through the mandatory Facebook and Twitter but also in creating a compelling culture surrounding the brand. 2010 will be a fantastic year for Vice as it builds a culture around the new premium Icewine blend category and welcomes new entrants as they fill the room.

Web: http://www.vicemartini.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/vicemartini
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/VICE-MARTINI/111092653478?ref=ts&__a=1
Vice Package Design: Post

Vineland Estates: http://www.vineland.com