Starring a tree peony and a hand-drawn wordmark, Mythology’s brand for Sake Ono is a show stealer — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

For anyone who’s taken a sip of a crisp sake from a porcelain cup, it’s easy to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into the making of Japan’s national beverage. More so if the spirit is crafted at the eighth-oldest brewery in Japan. When NYC-based design studio Mythology was tasked with creating the identity for Sake Ono – a brand steeped in heritage, with a spirit that’s made at a 470-year-old brewery in the Japanese Alps – they had to both honour the centuries-old legacy that backs the brand, but also their intent to redefine how sake can be enjoyed, beyond traditional settings.

“We wanted the visuals for Sake Ono to capture its purity and Japan’s rich heritage of sake – but to avoid pastiche interpretations that felt well worn and uninspired,” Creative Director Sophie Mascatello tells us. The team’s gaze, quite naturally, was drawn towards Japanese art history. Inspiration poured in from “kintsugi, paper triptychs, and the geometry of zen gardens” that filtered into early sketches and iterations of the Sake Ono label. “We then decided on floral woodblock prints as a starting point for the final design and dug into research on how we could use symbolism and colour to cue these ideas of purity and celebration,” Mascatello explains.

Symbolism was important, as the team wanted “the earth to play a role in the branding,” Designer ​​Bryson Lee adds. Flowers have been used throughout Japanese art history as a tool for storytelling, and so Mythology leaned towards this relationship and picked one of Japan’s native flowers – the tree peony – to be the star of the die-cut label. “Focusing on the purity of sake, we felt that a peony would be a successful symbol to pay homage to the earth and geography from which they originate; the flower is also symbolic of good fortune and traditionally served at celebratory occasions,” says Lee. The world of sake, as Mascatello rightly points out, can often feel very masculine, so “pairing the floral element with our dark bottle brought an interesting tension to the visual identity,” she adds.

While the peony points towards history and tradition, the wordmark – hand-drawn by Erik Berger Vaage and Rasmus Nilsson of Walk a Thought – brings a touch of modernity to the identity. The shaky, rough-edged letters speak to the contemporary heart of the label that breaks well-established codes in the traditional world of sake. To top it off, the black and white palette of the label – touched with a hint of ‘Toyo Red’ – set against the black bottle only adds to the high-impact beauty of Sake Ono, captured in the tasteful art direction by View Source.