Redesigning all the product labels for Tri-Art’s paints was a twofold challenge: Each product line needed a unique identity within the Tri-Art ecosystem, matched to its quality, features, and target audience, but it also needed to stand out amongst competing paints. On top of that, labels needed to meet regulatory standards, with English and French, as well as appropriate warnings.
With these considerations, I systematically worked through each paint line to develop new branding, graphics and layouts.
The impetus of this project revolved around upgrading the printing process, and with new printer capabilities our labels needed to be set up to easily integrate into an automated printing system.
I researched a solution using an InDesign plugin called Designmerge that allowed me to customize the look of the label while retaining the ability to populate key information with variable data from a database. This essentially turned a spreadsheet of data into hundreds of unique PDF labels.
To organize this monumental amount of information, I created a MySQL database containing all pertinent data for the labels, with room for expansion should we need to add more in future. I then created a printing server using Python to automatically control how print runs will be processed for the labelling department.
With the completion of the label redesign project, we now needed new product images for online sales and advertising. Previously, the company would take a few months of time to manually photograph products, edit and upload the images to the online store. With thousands of colours and mediums across various product lines, I realized 3D rendering was the solution we needed to dramatically speed up this process.
I 3D modelled every container used by the company and created a plugin for Blender that could automatically render the correct size bottles with the corresponding colours and label files. Then I used Python to create tools that automatically upload the generated product photos to Shopify. This ended up saving our team thousands of hours, and we would no longer need to manually photograph then upload over 20,000 new product images for the website.
