Dieline Awards | 95First place in the water category: Jinkuang - The Perfect Laminar Flow • Designer: Shenzhen Tigerpan DesignIt’s believed that Chinese is the only ethnic group that drinks cool boiled water. It is a unique institutionalized custom for generations. To the Chinese, drinking boiled water is sort of cultural heritage and part of domestic life, the elder showing caring through encouraging the younger generations to drink ‘hygiene boiled water’. This vital part to Chinese daily life was portrayed perfectly by a treasury Song-Dynasty painting named Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival about a thousand years ago.The label design here expresses more of the lifestyle than of the function of the water. The highly transparent glass bottle is embossed with a re-creation of the artwork. Combined with a traditional Chinese layout, the bottle is modernizing the art into our daily life. Twelve bottles stand for 12 earthly branches and 12 themes of the paintings are shown on each, which line up to form a long scroll. As the bottles are customized for high-end meetings and events alike, they communicate culture and leave a premium impression. After use, it can also function as an artwork or for storage use.Second place in the dark spirits category: Mona – Rock Bottom Rum • Designer: Demelza RaffertyMona’s Void Bar created its rum, and the packaging system is sleek and sophisticated. Because sandstone is rooted within the brand’s foundation, a piece of sandstone is affxed to the bottle’s base. And beyond the bottle’s elegant structure, the label is interesting because it’s attached across the top, creating a new way of viewing a bottle. The right amount of distinctive styles allows this brand to stand out.The design brief for a rum for Mona’s Void Bar said that the bar sits at the subterranean base of Mona, cut out of the sandstone rock the museum sits on. The packaging for this tiny bottle should be premium, and tie into the Void Bar branding – a long black vertical rectangle – utilizes the sandstone, and the general dark vibe of Mona. Demelza Rafferty came up with an oversized tamper-proof seal label, to not obstruct the view of the golden- colored liquid within. The Void Bar logo is incorporated into the seal. The typography for ‘Rum’ evokes a pirate feel with its cutlass-esque ‘R’ as a nod to the origin and mythology of rum, and to Mona as a rebel brand. The bottle has an actual piece of sandstone affxed to its base; echoing the Void Bar at the bottom of the sandstone museum, a literal rock-bottomed rum. A custom slide-box was produced to both enhance the premium quality of packaging and for safe shipping.Second place in the wine and champagne category: Saura • Designer: MabaThe packaging design of Saura wine implements the stone texture within the label design because Saura is a wine fermented in fossil stone tanks. The intricate details, paired with the gorgeous texture, create an immersive design experience that’s entirely unparalleled.This small winery is located in a unique place, a farm in the mountains in the municipality of Caravaca de la Cruz, which houses in its territory numerous species of fauna and vegetation that coexist with small terraces of vineyards immersed in the forest. The wine is fermented in fossil stone tanks, and extracted from a surrounding quarry. The proposal for the design of the wine label takes up this wild nature, as if it were a bas-relief sculpted in the stone, to narrate the process of the wine inside it.The family consists of three wines, Mesias, Cogevientos and Cauro Ventum. The differentiation of the top range is marked by the color sealing as well as a slight darkening of the stone. The most special and limited edition, under the name of Mesias, marks each numbered bottle on its band, sealing the cork with sealing wax in a traditional way.Cauro Ventum, the entry wine of the range refects its freshness in a more illustrated narrative, abandoning the reliefs without losing the magic of the place.The Dieline will be hosting The Dieline Forum, a design and branding-focused conference, during Labelexpo Europe 2023. For more information, visit www.labelexpo-europe.com/dieline-forumJul - Sep 2023