Manuel Millán

Cuenca, EC -> Worldwide

LN IN GH
Hero
Role UI/UX
Client Confidential
Timeline 2025

D’cache Tags Designs

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01 / Concept

Strategy & Execution

Hey Manuel, these look fantastic! It looks like we’ve moved from the custom die-cut front stickers to full wrap-around labels. The D’ Cache branding is super consistent here, but you’ve managed to give each product its own distinct personality.

Since these are full wraps covering the whole cylinder of the bottle, the Illustrator workflow shifts from just making a cool graphic to doing some heavy information architecture. Here is how you’d set up this production file.

PHASE 1: The Wrap-Around Canvas

When doing bottle wraps, precision is everything. If the measurements are off by even a millimeter, the label will overlap weirdly or leave a gap on the physical bottle.

  1. Setting the Dimensions: You start by getting the exact flat dimensions from the printing company for a 20 fl. oz. bottle. You create a wide rectangular Artboard.
  2. Safety Guides: You drop a vertical guide right down the middle. The left side is your “Front Display Panel” (the sexy part), and the right side is your “Information Panel” (the technical part). You also pull in guides for the margins—you don’t want the WhatsApp number wrapping too far around the curve of the bottle where people can’t see it.
  3. The Bleed: Just like the last ones, a 3mm bleed around the entire outside is mandatory so the background colors print all the way to the edge of the paper when trimmed.

PHASE 2: Front Panel Aesthetics

The lighting on these cars is doing exactly what it needs to do—selling that deep, glossy shine.

  1. Background Integration: You place those high-res car renders on the left side. For the “Freshner Strawberry”, dropping in those floating strawberries is a nice touch. To do that in Illustrator, you just place transparent .PNG files of the strawberries and add a subtle Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow to give them some depth against the dark background.
  2. Typography Tricks: * For the WASH & WAX and FRESHNER titles, you are using heavy, italicized fonts filled with solid white or gradients.
    • But look at TRIM CLEANER—you used the exact same technique as the glass cleaner from the last batch. You typed out the text, placed a photo of a rusted or textured metal surface behind it, and hit Ctrl/Cmd + 7 to create a Clipping Mask. It makes the text look gritty and tough, perfectly fitting a trim restorer.

PHASE 3: Back Panel Layout (The Grid)

This is where the real layout work happens. Setting up the typography on that back panel is exactly like setting up CSS classes for a website layout—you want everything to be perfectly uniform across all the different pages, or in this case, the different bottles.

  1. Paragraph Styles: Instead of manually formatting the text every time, you open the Paragraph Styles panel. You create one style for the “MODO DE USO” headers (red, bold, italic), another style for the numbered list (white, sans-serif, specific line height), and another for the legal warnings. This guarantees the spacing is identical whether the user is reading the Strawberry air freshener or the Wax.
  2. Color Management: Notice how the Strawberry label has a white background on the back, but the Wash & Wax uses a dark background? You have to be super careful here to invert your text colors so everything stays legible.
  3. Icons and Footers: The warning triangles, the little WhatsApp icon, and the bottom logo need to be aligned perfectly to the bottom margin guide. Using the Align Panel (distributing horizontal and vertical space) keeps this footer looking tight and professional.

PHASE 4: Pre-Flight for the Printer

Since this file has a lot of placed images (the cars, the strawberries, the clipping mask textures) and tons of small text, the export needs to be bulletproof.

  1. Embed Images: Go to the Links panel and make sure all those background photos are explicitly embedded in the Illustrator file, otherwise, the printer will just see blank squares.
  2. Outline Fonts: Select all that back-panel text and outline it (Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + O). If the printer doesn’t have that specific futuristic font you used for “WASH & WAX”, it will default to something awful like Myriad Pro and ruin the design.
  3. Color Space: Verify everything is strictly CMYK. Those neon reds and icy blues on the cars can look a little duller in print than they do on a glowing monitor, so sometimes you have to bump up the saturation in the CMYK profile before saving the final PDF.
02 / Visuals
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