So Hot Right Now is a start-up hot sauce company based out of Atlanta. The fledgling company was in need of a "trendy" logo as well as labels and carrier for their assorted 4-pack. The aesthetic they wanted me to use was the popular hand-lettered chalkboard style which played in to the idea behind the name of their company "So Hot Right Now," a quote borrowed from the film Zoolander.
While there are a plethora of hand-lettered style canned fonts to choose from, I wanted to design the letters from scratch so that the chalkboard style would have an air of authenticity. For the labels, I wanted to use flat vivid colors so that the bottles would stand out from others on a shelf.
During market research, I found that many hot sauce labels are very busy and designs tend to blend together from one to the next. For this product to stand out, it needed to have a similar vibrancy to the other labels, but be less busy which was achieved by using the bright spot colors with white text.
For the carrier, I decided to contrast the high gloss and color of the labels by utilizing a matte, chalkboard texture and color to really make the labels pop. The design around the edges of the carrier purposefully have imperfections to make the chalkboard look real.
What I like the most about the material used for the carrier is that it can actually be utilized as a chalkboard. Since this 4-pack was designed to be a gift set, it would also be sold with a piece of chalk that the buyer could use to write the name of the gift's recipient.
Thumbnail explorations for the hand-lettered logo.
FINAL DESIGN
AND PACKAGING
