We’ve known about the wunder-kids over at MASH for a while… but didn’t know how good they actually were until recently when someone told us they’re quite a big deal. We caught up with one of the MASH directors, Dom Roberts for eggs Florentine at East Terrace Continental to inquire about how they created a wine label that won an award something like the design equivalent of an Oscar... or something.

How does the technology work?
What it is, is there’s different layers, there’s vertical lines stacked on top of each other and depending on what angle you’re looking at it from, will change what image it is you can see. We just thought it looked cool basically. It’s the same technology as the cards you’d get when you’re a kid, the Tazos or Spiderman cards out of the cornflakes packet but we’d just never seen it done on wine-label packaging is all.

Was it your idea? What was the brief from the winery?
Yeah, it was our idea. It’s done by this guy called Justin Lane and he has a company of his own that’s in the process of changing names and brands and in the meantime he’s gone out and done his own thing. The story behind it basically is that there were two wine makers, Justin and Mark and they both happened to share the same last name. Mark is from a company called Swings and Roundabouts, that does Little Creatures and he’s a winemaker as well. They’d always talked about doing a wine together but, you know, it was always a hard thing because he was in WA and Justin is in McLaren Vale. So what they decided to end up doing was to say “you do some stuff with wine in WA and I’ll do some stuff here, we’ll ship that here and blend it…see what happens”. It’s something different, something that I’m not aware of being done before. So it’s got grape varieties from Margaret River and McLaren Vale. I don’t think that had ever been done before so we wanted something different for the label, because the whole product was different. So we took two mug shots of the guys, one saying: Lane One, one saying: Lane Two and then we created a Photoshop file where the head was the only thing that changed and the number on the sign. The torso is the same.
 
There’s a funny story, a friend of mine who works at East End Cellars was out doing a wine tasting and saw this label. He knows Justin and was thinking to himself “oh check out Justin, put a photo of himself on a label, how much does he love himself?” and he was pouring it and he saw the face change and, he’d had a few drinks by this stage, so he stepped back, rubbed his eyes and he poured the wine again, seeing the same effect. Apparently he thought he was having a nervous break-down for a while until someone else said “isn’t it great how the face changes?”

So you guys won an award for this label eh?
The D&AD awards are in the UK, they’re out of London and they’re a branding and design award that covers all sorts of things from motion graphics through to packaging and print... a whole bunch of mediums, and it’s an international award. It’s commercially based. There’s always some sort of commercial background to what’s being entered but some designers do use it as a way of self-promotion. So a lot of big brands go in there. It’s probably one of the bigger awards around the world and we thought we’d enter. There’s another designer here who didn’t get a pencil but did get in the book, the D&AD book and we thought, “that’s awesome, that’s huge”. And that’s probably a lot of the way people approach the awards with the aim to get in the book.

What’s the book?
It’s a hard back coffee table book, generally $150 to buy. So that’s one level, then there’s the next level which is the Pencil awards. In our category there was a whole bunch of packaging in the book and the Yellow Pencil was between us and Absolut Vodka disco bottle, and we topped them for it. We’re a little company of six people in Adelaide and we’re not sure who did (the Absolut bottle) but I’m sure it was a whole big company. So since then we’ve had enquiries from the UK which has been brilliant and there’s media attention, we’re lucky enough to be in a couple of great French Magazines and design blogs. The only problem with the award is that people enquiring assume you’re from the UK. When they’re enquiring, as soon as you say you’re from Adelaide, sometimes they go off the boil. Buy yeah, big award the analogy as some would say is the Oscars.

You can buy Changing Lanes for around $31 a bottle.