Usonia, run by Julia & Alex Alvarez-Perez, makes minimal intervention wines from fruit from their own Cayuga Lake vineyard and from likeminded growers. The name comes from Frank Lloyd Wright, who coined the term to refer to his vision of a democratic American landscape unbound by Old World conventions. Since first reimagining the brand’s labels in 2022, we have overseen all Usonia releases.

In collaboration with Drew Litowitz, we developed a spirited yet rigorous design system that allows each wine’s distinct personality to come forward, while preserving a strong visual connection across Usonia’s entire portfolio.

An eclectic selection of typography references—and subverts—traditional wine labels. Paired with juicy color blocked hues and surreal illustration, the bottles stand together in a gradient of color, and apart from competitors.

Each year, we work with a single artist to create illustrations for all releases. In 2022, we collaborated with JoMinor.

Our design system accommodates playfulness and improvisation as the brand evolves. For example, our Tocai Friulano design breaks from the solid colors of prior labels, introducing gentle gradients that nod to the charitable purpose behind this release, from which a portion of proceeds benefited LGBTQ+ farmers.

We’ve also brought our eclectic type-handling to stationery for the brand, like these letterpress notecards.

In 2023, we worked with artist ThéophileBartz. In addition to updating illustrations annually, we also remix each labels’s color blocking to differentiate releases from year to year.

As new wines are added to the Usonia family, we continue to find new ways to utilize this robust grid and color system.

In 2023, we also worked with Théophile Bartz to create a unique t-shirt coinciding with the year’s releases.

2024’s releases included a one-off series of wines born out of a devastating late spring frost in the Finger Lakes that required Usonia to look outside of their region for fruit for the first time. For these special releases, we created purely typographic labels printed in icy tints of cyan.

For Usonia’s standard labels, we partnered with LindaMerad to create a new suite of creatures to populate our utopian world.

We also developed a new label style for the first wine release from Usonia’s home vineyard, New Suns. (A nod to Octavia Butler: “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”) New Suns die cut label is formed by duplicating and rotating the Usonia logo to form a subtle sun shape.