Perception Wine Funzig : Blackburn Web Design company. Web Design Blackburn, Ribble Valley, Accrington, Whalley, Clitheroe, BB1, Darwen, Lancashire. Website designer

See the Perception Wine website!

Client notes

A new brand of dealcoholised wine was about to be launched in the summer of 2006 by Yorkshire based marketing company, Understated Marketing

Design brief

The product was aimed squarely at a female market and branding and it's follow through into an online presence was crucial to it's marketing. Understated Marketing commissioned me to design a brochure style site in the first instance to act as a promotions vehicle for the new alcohol free drink with the proposal that an online shop be developed off the back of this preliminary site.

Understated also commisioned a logo design to be used on all promotional and packaging materials which became the key to the rest of the site design.

Development notes

The concept for the logo was based around the well known "Vase/Face" optical illusion except this time wings and a wine glass were used as the alternating images. I wanted to develop a visual play on words by using a graphic that would play with the viewers "perception". Wings were chosen as a symbol of the freedom that drinking "Perception" would give the consumer; freedom to drive home after the party, freedom of choice and freedom from hangovers and because they establish the curves that are apparently so appealing to many women.

The "found" artefact that this design was based on came from a photograph of an ancient stone carving of a wing. This image was imported into a vector drawing package and traced and tweaked into a further stylised form which allowed the inset wine glass outline to be defined, itself based on the outline of a wine glass taken from a photograph.

The colour scheme for the site was derived from an artificial vine we had hanging over the cabinets in the kitchen. I took a photograph of it against a plain background, imported into a graphics package and picked complementary green and purples from it to create an organic feel. Originally the vine itself was to feature in preliminary draft compositions of the site as a page divider between the sidebar and the main content. This was eventually thought to be "too fussy" and cluttered the screen somewhat. Subtle purple (again a female favourite which also echoes the red wine) gradients were picked form this colour scheme and  applied to the logo to give a 3D feel. These are somewhat lost on the website but come into their own on printed materials.The e-commerce engine used on the site is Cubecart, chosen for its flexible architecture and it's ability to be "skinned" with standards compliant user designed templates, it's incredibly low licence fee and it's excellent user support forums. The online shop section of the site is currently awaiting final client commerce integration but is available for demonstration purposes at http://www.perceptionwine.com/shop