Raki x Ume
Designed a playful, cross-cultural umeshu brand inspired by Ontario-grown ume and Turkish rakı.
Project Type:
Brand Identity
Focus:
Branding, Visual Design
Context:
Personal Project
Date:
Nov 2025
An experimental branding exploration at the intersection of craft, culture, and visual storytelling through a one-of-a-kind umeshu blend.
Raki × Ume is a personal branding and visual identity project inspired by my annual tradition of making homemade umeshu, a Japanese plum wine created by steeping unripe ume plums in alcohol and sugar over time.
Each year, I explore small variations, but for this batch I took a more unconventional approach by using Turkish Yeni Rakı as the base spirit. The result was a surprisingly complex and aromatic blend that brought together Japanese tradition and Turkish character in a way I had not seen explored before.
Inspired by this unexpected fusion, I set out to design a modern brand identity and label that reflected the spirit of experimentation, craft, and cross cultural storytelling behind the blend.
A visual identity built to honor tradition while inviting experimentation.
This project became an opportunity to explore how thoughtful visual design can elevate a homemade product into a cohesive brand experience.
While created purely for personal enjoyment, Raki × Ume serves as the foundation for an ongoing series of future blends, each with its own distinct flavor profile, cultural reference, and visual direction.
For the visual identity, I aimed to honor traditional Japanese art influences while presenting the ume plums in a natural and restrained way through black and white sketch-style illustrations. Subtle red and white accents reference both the Turkish and Japanese flags, creating a quiet visual connection between the two cultures without overpowering the design.
As the first exploration in my umeshu series, this project sets the tone for future iterations, with new blends and identities already in progress including guava, mango, and plum batches made with a variety of spirits.