Mary Kate McDevitt is an illustrator and hand letterer based in Brooklyn. She approaches lettering with a vintage style and a playful twist. Clients include Nike, Sesame Street, Puffin Books, Adobe, and Chronicle Books.
Were you involved in creating the “M” logo embossed in the glass at the top of the bottle?
mary kate mcdevitt: I didn’t create the logo, but I did redraw it so it had a similar hand-drawn edge as the rest of the label.
Was it a challenge to fit words of different lengths (e.g, “Mojito,” “Margarita”) into a fixed width?
“Margarita” was the biggest challenge to fit; all the other flavors fit so perfectly. For a round or two of revisions, I had “Margarita” at a shorter height because I was concerned with the legibility. In the end, we decided to make it all the same height so everything is cohesive (plus, it looks much better together on the shelves this way).
There is a lot of ingredient lettering. Do you create whole alphabets in advance? Or did you just make it up as you went?
There was a lot of attention paid to the ingredients because the client really wanted the natural and organic ones to be featured rather than set in small type and at the bottom. The lettering for the ingredients was all custom because we wanted to call out certain words in different styles and insert some illustrations of fruit or ornamentation.
How do you address issues of scale/weight/legibility between small and large letters?
Since there was such a difference between the lengths of the words, like “Margarita,” I couldn’t use an ornate style; it would have been so hard to read. I still wanted the labels to have a special look, so I went with a rounded serif and relied on the lock-up to carry that unique quality.
Do you draw at size? Or bigger, then reduce?
For these labels, I drew them bigger then reduced them. Most of the time I draw at size. The issue that comes up when you draw bigger and then reduce is making sure the line weights will translate when the scale shifts. So I just had to review the drawings at the correct scale.
The final is more casual and less rustic than some of your sketches. Talk about those variations and the evolution of the approach.
The brief was to make the brand look specialty, organic, and hand drawn. I did some variations on simple hand-drawn type with special accents, and some with a focus on uniqueness. I loved the script and ornamental and illustrative sketches, but the client ultimately felt that the script and more ornamental sketches were too fancy. In the end, I was very pleased with the look and feel of the label, which fit with the brand and concept.
product: Miami Cocktail Co. Small Batch Organics
client: Miami Cocktail Co.
creative director: Omar Morson
designer/hand letterer: Mary Kate McDevitt
medium: Pen and ink
country: United States
The lettering was drawn larger, then reduced, with careful attention paid to line weights so proper proportion and legibility were maintained. The logo was also redrawn by hand to integrate more gracefully with the rest of the package.
The more embellished lettering and ornamentation of these early sketches was eventually discarded in favor of a less “fancy” aesthetic.
