Welcome back! Today is the third and final installment of our Jordan Jelev interview. From classic calligraphy to modern typographic masterpieces, Jordan has found a real niche for beautiful labels in the wine industry.

Dave Hile: You have an impressive range of styles, from an ornamental calligraphic style to a sleek modern typographic approach. How did you develop your strong type design skills?

Jordan Jelev: I am both a typography addict and a professional calligrapher, which sets me free in type design. My work might be improved by using some digital fonts, but in many situations you have to switch to custom lettering unless you don’t want to have just “another ordinary design.” Custom lettering is my specialty—it is one of those things that makes my designs more distinguished and recognizable. It is somehow like a personal signature that brings more and more identity to the final product. We are in the 21st century now—everything in our life is so plastic, synthetic and automatic. I think it is good for a digital artist to have experience as a craftsman. I’ll give you an example from March of this year. I was designing the new labels of the Royal Selection wine range (domaineboyar.com). I started looking for some interesting font set to write the word Royal in a more artistic manner—it took me nearly three days and I was still unsatisfied with the result. I used my quills and it took me one more day to do the custom lettering for the same word—the result was amazing.

The background of my custom lettering history starts in my near past. I got a present from my father and my wife—a set of automatic pens and an old bottle filled with ink. Up to that day I had so many digital fonts in my head, and when I grabbed the pens I thought I could write every one of them.

DH: Aside from the typography, you show a lot of innovation in the textures and shapes of your labels—in the planning process, do you tend to envision all these elements as one entity, or do you tend to focus on one element separately and then build the others around it?

JJ: The shape and the texture are design elements, too. They significantly improve the communication between the product and consumers. Imagine that you are 3-4 meters away from the bottle of wine in the store; what you see first is the bottle shape, the label shape, and probably some basic colors—that’s what our eyes produce as an image to our brain. The closer you get to the bottle, the more things you start to see better and better till the moment you have it in your hands, where you can touch it, feel it, maybe even smell it—and finally remember it (and buy it, of course).

All those textures, shapes, varnishes, embossing, etc. are important parts of my design—some projects need to use all of them at once, others don’t need them. It just depends on what both the designer and the market experts say and want from the final product.

DH: You’ve done a lot of work for Bulgarian companies. Are you looking to expand into new markets in other countries?

JJ: Bulgaria will always be an interesting place not only for wine label design, but for the whole wine industry, so I’m really happy to work for our native wineries. I am also focused on approaching some foreign clients from the U.S., South America, Australia and South Africa.

Maybe I should use your “Reverse Method” to approach them—start with a bottle of wine and then send an email! DH: Thanks for all the great insight into your work, your process, and your background, Jordan. It’s been fascinating to learn about design in Bulgaria, and we hope to see your labels gracing the shelves of American wine shops soon!

Visit Jordan Jelev or Factor R Studio to see more about Jordan.

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

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.