CENTRE COLLEGE
Honoring Centre Legends
The Centre College Office of Development and Alumni commissioned us to create a portrait series of eight legendary faculty and staff members. The images would be featured in packaging designs for a commemorative bottle of Wilderness Trail Bourbon in honor of the College’s Bicentennial in 2019.
The project was a great opportunity to immortalize campus legends while connecting Kentucky’s most prestigious college with it’s most famous product.
THE CHALLENGE
Create distinctive portraits of eight Centre College faculty and staff members to be used in commemorative bourbon packaging.
Versatility Required
The college intended to use the portrait series in a variety of sizes beyond the bourbon packaging. This meant that our approach would need to factor in the practical uses of the final pieces into materials and format choices.
Size Agnostic
The decision was made to go with a black and white pen and ink style for the portraits. To accommodate the need to resize the portraits, they would be drawn on a tablet in vector format.
THE SOLUTIONS
We created the eight requested portraits, as well as drawings of the Flame statue and Old Centre building.
Featured in the portraits were (clockwise from top left): Ray Hammond, Barbara Hall, Mona Wyatt, Milton Reigelman, Rubin Mosley, Sue Alexander, Roberta White, and Eric Mount. The style of the drawings is meant to call to memory etching techniques that were still in heavy use when the college was founded in 1819.
Beyond the portraits, they also requested drawings of the iconic “Flame” statue that students had made famous with their late-night “Flame Runs,” as well as the original state of the Old Centre building that once served as the only educational facility on campus. The plan was to use one of these pieces directly on the bottle, with the portraits featured on an included tasting notes card.
Old Centre
The Flame
The final design featured the Old Centre illustration on the front and side labels, while portraits of the faculty and staff were reproduced on an included tasting notes card.
Wilderness Trail Distillery
Located in Danville, Kentucky, Wilderness Trail Distillery has a knack for blending old traditions with the science of making Bourbon and other fine spirits.
