The Book of Spirits

This year we will be doing something very special. We will be creating our own Book of Spirits with some industry leading production companies. For one year we will be making 10 Spirit designs and really producing them, involving real brands. Together with the partners we will try to get as much of new techniques, embellishments etc. into the projects to make them as interesting as possible.

The special thing will be, that we will be taking the ‘making of’ live for people to follow on LinkedIn and Instagram, so they can follow the entire journey. Every month another Design, Brand and Story, every month two posts, one about design, one about product, taking them behind the scenes. In the end every single project will get its own separate 3-fold, including visuals, explanations, and the real produced label, so you can see, read, touch, and feel. Finally, all project 3 folds will be gathered in a quality hardcover box, transforming it into “the Book of Spirits”.

For this great new adventure, we partnered up with some industry leaders, who will be contributing their finest materials and techniques (in alphabetical order):
– Avery Dennison, Label and Packaging Materials
– Estal, glass bottle supplier
– Hinderer + Mühlich, High precision stamping dies
– Leonhard Kurz, hot foil supplier
– Reynders label printing
– Van Heertum Design VHD (ourselves, creating all the designs)

After the production, beginning of 2026 we will even give 500 books away for free, to followers of the entire journey, who can subscribe online via every post.

For this very special project we just created the first design:

“Xtabentún”

This first design, which will also be used for the cover of the book is a design translation of the complete project and gives homage to all the partners.

As an inspirational base for our label design, we used the Mayan culture, which was well known for their colourful civilization which excelled in craftsmanship and arts. So, our first spirit is Xtabentún. The liqueur was made with anise seeds and fermented honey produced by honeybees from the nectar of xtabentún flowers, after which rum was added.

We created the design carefully giving every partner a place on the label. The entire label is setup as a Mayan sun calendar, which features 1 year, as we will be working an entire year on the project. Divided by 4 seasons by the outer arrows. The small, refined edge pattern represents all the days of the year. In the first inner circles you will find many different spirits, of which we will feature some in the book. Names that would have been visualized by symbols in Mayan times.

Visual 1 – When going to the inner circle you can find some more details, like an abstract visualization of the honeybee, which plays a central part in the making of Xtabentún. Just above the honeybee we created half rolls representing Reynders label printing, and the many rolls you will find inside the printing machines at the Belgium company (see visual 3). On the bottom side we created the bottom part of a big paper roll (see visual 2) representing our label paper supplier Avery Dennison. In the bottom part of visual 1 we created some icons for a selection of Estal’s catalogue bottles (see visual 4). Next to this Leonhard Kurz is represented across the entire label by the beautiful 3 colours of hot foil we used, including the very detailed hot foil stamps and a slick debossing from Hinderer + Mülich.

Tricycle Studio was responsible for the main render of the bottle design.