J.M. Thomason Spices

Services: Package Art
Illustration & Design: Ligia Teodosiu & Aaron Johnson
Creative Direction: Joel Anderson

The Project

For many years, J.M. Thomason Spices has been supplying restaurants and other commercial businesses with bulk orders of exotic spices. They wanted to create a line of retail products to sell to consumers, so they asked us to illustrate and design some beautiful labels to go on their retail spice tins.

The Challenge

Each seasoning blend has a unique flavor story, often rooted in a specific culinary culture. Spices are basically ground up seeds and leaves, so it wouldn’t look good to illustrate the actual product—the packaging needed color, distinction, and ethnicity to help tell a compelling story.

The Solution

After doing lots of research, we realized that the most evocative way to sell a spice would be to tell a visual story of the traditions and cultures where the food and flavors originate from. So we rendered unique illustration panels on each label that would telegraph the specific food culture or recipe that the seasoning blend was made for.

Concepts

Each label needed to be easy to read from a distance. The name of the seasoning blend was just as important as the image, and they had to be easy to interpret at a glance from 10 feet away. We started out with rough ideas in black & white.

Tin Labels

Once each rough concept was approved, we added color to the illustration, being careful to make each blend as different from the others as possible. We don’t normally lay out entire packages (we prefer to stick to the illustrations only.) But on this project, we designed and laid out the entire label for each individual package.