Honey Tag

My sister and her husband are keeping bees in a discarded train wagon. Both work at a railway company, which explains the train wagon. There are even abandoned railways right behind their house.

They sell honey since 2013 and used a basic template from the Swiss Bee Keeper Association for their honey tag. To change that, they asked me to design a new one.

They live in Solothurn and have a perfect view on the Weissenstein (mountain) and the mountains next to him. So my brother-in-law and I, we both knew, that we should use this for the honey tag. So as first step, I took a picture of the panorama with the bee train wagon.

The blue bubble marks the position of the Weissenstein.

First, I tried to simplify the image to create a background for the tag with the trace-tool from illustrator, but it was too less simplified and there were way too much anchorpoints to delete, so I decided to path the background and the important details by “hand”.

To bring the self-made-feeling alive, I used recycled paper background. We didn’t want a polished tag, we wanted something down on earth and simple.

So here you see the finished honey tags. Since the summer honey is rather dark, I used the recycled paper background on this one and for the flowerhoney, which is much brighter, I used a slate background and reversed the font color.

With the selfmade icon right of the tag title, it gives a hint, what kind of honey it is, without reading the text. Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do at least.

For the icons I used the following images and recreated them in Adobe Illustrator to a simplifyed version of it.

The fir is for the forest honey, but they didn’t make any of it yet.

The next step was to find a printer company, who was able to make a self-sticking tag with this cut-out. So I visited a producer near by my home, but they couldn’t do, what I wanted. Then my brother-in-law recommended a printer near by their home, so they could get the tags, when they’re finished.

So with some E-Mails, we managed to create this beautiful tag, which immediately was recognized by the people, so they now have much more places, where they could sell their honey. Even in some places, there’s much cheapier honey, but people prefere the one from my sister, just because of the tag!

It was eye-opening when we saw the change, even for me and it’s such a motivating feeling, when people like, what you do or did!

Here you can see the comparison of the basic honey tag from the Swiss Bee Keeper Association on the right and on the left side is my design.