Four Pillars Wild Isle Gin
For the sixth instalment of their Distillers Series, Four Pillars partnered with Island Gin, an off-the-grid craft distillery located on northern New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island… a place renowned for its remoteness and untamed natural beauty. To reflect this special place, and this incredible gin, we needed to create a label that captured a sense of place in a physical way. This was a Distiller Series release that deserved a glow up.
Scope:
- Packaging Design
- Product Naming
- Illustration & Art Direction
- Photography & Art Direction
- Typography
- Finished Art
Let’s set the scene…
The Distiller Series is one of Four Pillars’ most established creative and experimental platforms… each release shaped by collaboration, character, and a strong sense of place.
For Wild Isle Gin, that place was Great Barrier Island, a landscape featuring dense rainforest, pristine waters and a rare darkness that reveals the night sky in its purest form. The gin itself reflects that origin, crafted with seaweed, saltwater and Manuka honey, drawing directly from the island’s natural environment.
Our brief was to interpret both the place and the liquid in a way that felt worthy of the Distiller Series and unmistakably Four Pillars. Ultimately, we needed to capture the feeling of this place… layered, diverse, and alive.
An island in a bottle
The response was to build a rich ecosystem through the development of a custom illustration that combined land and sea, flora and fauna, botanicals and movement into a single, interconnected composition.
That sense of duality was carried further through the introduction of glow-in-the-dark detailing where a second visual experience begins to emerge when the light dims, transforming the label’s mood and reflecting the island’s status as a Dark Sky Sanctuary.
Materiality and finish played an equally important role with metallics, layered greens and tactile detailing, carefully balanced to maintain the premium cues of the Distiller Series, while introducing a more expressive, textural quality that invites closer inspection.
The thinking extended beyond the pack itself, with art direction for photography carrying the same sense of transformation, using light, shadow and composition to echo the shift from day to night and bring the story to life across every touchpoint.
