Acid Distillery Brand + Creative Direction
Acid Distillery is a Brooklyn startup distilling small-batch spirits from upcycled food waste as well as locally sourced ingredients from small farms. Sustainability is the focus of their brand. I joined in January 2022 as designer and became Creative Director & Brand Manager within six months.
Upon diving into research I discovered our strongest buyers weren’t consumers but bartenders, restaurant owners, and bottle shops. So the idea became to give bartenders a story worth telling, through a hand-painted bottle art that stops guests mid-order and an upcycling story that’s easy to retell. Since this company is built on mindful consumption, mindful connection was central for our activation process. We leaned heavily into pop-ups, tastings, our annual birthday party, sustainability events, a limited-edition poster series, and merch with a local sustainable clothing brand.
Result: 20+ collaborations with top NYC bars, inbound interest from Eleven Madison Park and Blue Hill Farm, DTC growth every year for 4 years, an extremely loyal customer base, and national US distribution.
Role: Creative + Brand Director, Communication Strategist, Designer
Hero Story Creative Direction
Acid Distillery's process is the heart of their brand — ingredients sourced locally to NYC, selected seasonally at the moment of distillation, with all waste from the process repurposed. I set out to turn that process into a compelling visual narrative for their landing page rather than a static explainer. I directed the concept and edited the piece myself in Adobe Premiere Pro, treating sound as a design element — syncing audio cues to visual transitions so the rhythm of the piece mirrors the rhythm of distillation itself.
It was as much a directing exercise as an editing one: deciding how the story should unfold, then getting into the timeline myself to build that pacing and sync by hand.
Files were finalized in Adobe Premiere Pro
Motion Design / Content Creation
Examples of SoMe motion designs made for Acid Distillery.
Made in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
Bespoke Illustration
I illustrated all assets in these ingredient-specific spirits. Elements were created for the labels as well as for social media and web collateral.
All compositions were illustrated by hand with watercolors and then brought into Adobe Photoshop for editing.
Files were finalized in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign.
Branded Merchandise
We worked with a local NYC sustainable clothing line to develop branded merch for our live events around NYC. Linking with likeminded businesses help strengthen our brands commitment to sustainability and locality.
Files were finalized in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Limited Edition Poster Series
Acid Distillery's ingredient lineup rotates with the seasons, and I wanted the posters to carry that same sense of the handmade and temporary rather than feeling mass-produced. I proposed hand-painted watercolor illustrations for each rotating ingredient — a deliberate strategic choice to give the brand a tactile, artisanal presence that would hold up in physical event spaces, where customers could encounter something made by hand rather than printed at scale. I painted every element myself, then composed and finalized the posters in Photoshop and InDesign as a limited-edition run tied directly to the live-event experience.
Hand painted with watercolors, edited in Adobe Photoshop, and assembled in Adobe Indesign.
