We were delighted to win gold in the Packaging category for our work on The Art of St Andrews 2023 single malt release from Eden Mill. This was our third year working on the series, so by now we’ve got it down to a fine art, if you’ll pardon the pun. Each year we engage a local artist to create a bespoke piece of art to wrap the box. For 2023 we worked with Jill Calder, whose work brought a vibrancy and lightness to a drinks category that often tends towards darker, more sombre designs. Says Jill: “I kind of pulled my inspiration and influence from location, from the flavours in the whisky and what Eden Mill wanted to achieve with that. Every single word about that grassiness and vibrancy and smoky sweetness, you know, there was a whole list of things. Every one of those made me think, OK, colour or texture or combination. How can I play with that?”

This isn’t the first award this whisky has won: last year it was awarded the highest honour at the The Spirits Business Design & Packaging Masters. Alastair Cliff, strategy director at design agency Here commented at the time: “A clear concept, beautifully executed. The artistic design by Jill Calder is richly detailed, and strongly evokes a sense of place. The jewels on the bottle are beautifully done, and the aligning of the label is of very high quality. Strong, confident, bottle shape.”

Our second gold of the night came in the Brand Identity - Civic category, where our work on the brand new, £27 million Perth Museum was honoured. Commissioned by Culture Perth and Kinross to develop a brand and website which could change perspectives of the area, we were interested in the challenge of creating a brand identity that expressed a more contemporary understanding of what a museum can be and who it can speak to.

We’re excited by projects which want to change things, to challenge how people see and experience the world around them. Colour, type and messaging establish the Museum as vibrant and modern while retaining credibility. The bold, wide-ranging palette includes bright contemporary colours balanced with earthy and natural tones referencing the beautiful local landscape.

Ashleigh Hibbins (Head of Audiences and Learning, Culture Perth and Kinross) says of the project: “This was an extremely complex and politically-sensitive project involving many different stakeholders, and I knew from the beginning that Tangent would be the right team to navigate the choppy waters of distilling a huge museum development project into an elegant, authentic, flexible, and unique design identity.” The visitor count to Perth Museum has been double the expected numbers, and the experience was recently awarded five stars by national tourism body VisitScotland.

Congratulations to everyone in attendance - as a team that won two awards but were up for five, we are well aware that ‘tis an honour just to be nominated. Perhaps we’ll be back next year.