Cut From a Different Tartan

I started at Halo in 2023, fresh as a two-week-old supermarket daisy out of university. At that point, the Deanston brief had been in the system for a while. The idea was ‘Cut From a Different Tartan’. Deanston’s distillery is pretty unconventional in terms of the Whisky world. It’s not hundreds of years old. It resides in a defunct cotton mill. Their entire distlling process is pretty unorthodox because the kit was retrofitted into said defunct cotton mill. It’s also pretty damn delicious. Halo needed some headlines to help bring that unruly teenage energy and the design system we’d made to life.

This was my first brief at the agency, and first brief in my career that wasn’t a content calendar or broadsheet headlines. Naturally, I went home, stayed up all night, and came to work the following day with a Google Doc bursting at the pixels. Most of it was rubbish. However, the not-rubbish parts snagged Halo a shortlist in Writing for Design at the 2024 D&AD Awards.