Recently I had the chance to work on a label for a line of handmade candles which became one of my dearest projects. The design was pretty unique so I’ve decided to share all the design process with you. Don’t worry I had the full approval from the client. I’m not going to get into specific details, but I want you to know how I made this unique design.

Modern Candle Label

The client wanted the label to represent the most iconic buildings in Philadelphia in the form of a city line. The target audience consists in upper class women and men and the brand attributes given by the client are organic, clean, handmade, modern, and crisp.

With these attributes in mind I created the mood board which inspired me during the design process. The mood board contains elements that describe or capture the feelings I would want the label to project onto the clients.

Here you have the mood board.

We decided to go on with a transparent label that will have the city line rendered as a clean and modern sketch. So, with all that in mind I moved to the next step: looking for pictures that represent the Philadelphia city line. Here you have some of the images I considered to be a good fit for the starting point.

I’ve chosen the one form the top and started to trace the skyline in Adobe Illustrator. Here you have the traced image and the outline after I applied different effects to the stroke.

At this point the client was satisfied with the overall look of the city line but wanted me to work with another image. Also he wanted me to include in the sketch the City Hall with William Penn’s statue and the LOVE sign. Here you have the image and the new traced version:

Final design

After further tweaks and adjustments here and there, the final version came out looking like this:

It was so exciting to be part of this project and to see my work coming alive! The client was thrilled with the design and that made me more than happy. These are the moments that make me feel that all those long hours of hard work really worth it!