Today we have part two of our three-part interview featuring Jordan Jelev, the vastly talented Bulgarian label designer. Also known as “The Labelmaker,” Jordan gives us an in-depth view of his career and his process, as well as some excellent examples of his work. Make sure to visit soon for the third and final installment.

Dave Hile: What does your creative process entail? Do you taste the wine before designing the label? Do you research the vineyard’s other offerings? For example, on the Bulgarian wine +359 design (which is based on the country’s international phone code), you utilized the type font from the Bulgarian Post in the 1960s. Do you always think so carefully about historical or social aspects of the design?

Jordan Jelev: I did not expect it would turn into a normal practice, but the answer is yes—I always taste the wine before starting my work. It is a significant part of the process. When you design the outer part, you have to know what is inside the bottle in order to make a connection between them and to portray it correctly to the buyer of the product. So when you know what’s inside the bottle, it’s really easy to design a label for it. This makes the whole thing 100% authentic because all the elements of the final product are related to one another. I don’t go crazy finding and creating such relationships between history, wine itself, design, or even aspects of consumer psychology, but I do think that if there is a significant story related to the product, we should bring it forward and show it to people.

DH: Do you have a few favorite labels you’ve designed that you’d like to share with us? Why are these your favorites?

JJ: Sure, though I might say I like all of them.

I am in such a creative period in my development that I am beginning to understand the sense of being different in the wine industry.

I started to think differently when I was creating a label following my new formula—which is, that there has to be something remarkable about the label so people can remember it.

There are several examples of my new period—Rousse Rose is one of them. I decided to make a label based entirely on custom modern typography. So I designed letters consisting of small dots overprinted with puff up varnish. The result was amazing—the letter looked like it was made of small led lights. I believe this label is a good example of modern thinking, considering the fact that I am addicted to vintage typography and calligraphy. So this label was kind of unusual for me. Another good example of my more modern design is my latest work for Sarva, and the Project Wines by Dragomir Winery. I had a wonderful time working for those people, and the result was surprising even to me. The whole design is based on the welding and intersecting of three elements, because the wines were a blend of three grape varieties.

We used ultra-gloss, silver-coated, self-adhesive foil to print the labels on and when used in combination with my favorite puff-up varnish, the result was a great success.

Now to the old classics—A few years ago, I began wanting to design a label that says everything about my skills, technical experience, calligraphy—everything about me as a professional creative. That turned out to be my Shiraz Label created for PVN brand.

The label is 100% hand-crafted, against all the supermoderndigitalhyperturbo 21^st-century technology. I drew it on a sheet of A4-size paper. I photographed it then transferred it to polymer plates and printed it in my kitchen in the cold winter of 2007 at 3 a.m. in the morning.

That label was great fun for me—I still recall it time and again.

Stay tuned for part 3…

Tags: Bulgarian designers, epixs.eu, Factor R studio, Jordan Jelev, label design, the Labelmaker, wine labels

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.