High Desert
High Desert Cactus Vodka is pretty self-explanatory. It’s vodka distilled from 100% prickly-pear cactus. It was born in Marfa and developed in Austin, and has the split personality of being the perfect beverage poolside LA to stargazing at midnight in the desert.
It tastes more like a tequila than a vodka (pro), and no one has ever heard of it (con).
The path to a higher quality, more sustainable, better tasting vodka is paved with pricks. Literally.
It’s really hard to do something well, and the founders of High Desert have years of perfecting this spirit to prove that. Through sheer determination and after many set-backs, they never gave up on making their idea into a reality. We channeled this fortitude and the spirit of desert resilience to remind our audience its not about arriving but how you got there: The Difference is in the Making.
*The film above is not yet complete, graded, mixed etc.
Michael DiChristina (the genius) designed the bottle and partnered with me on print design.
The first pitch that has made a client cry, in a good way.
Design was based off balancing duality inspired by the desert. Masculine & feminine, modern & organic, severity & beauty.
Taking this from pitch adolescent to real life adult meant going straight to the source in the mountains of Mexico and documenting the annual prickly-pear harvest.
Visuals and the bottle itself were refined to channel and feature nature as closely as possible. One to differentiate High Desert from their frosty European competitors and two to make the product as honest and closely tied to its source as possible.
