During my six years at Monsieur Touton, our design queue ran on a ticketed system, and the wine invite requests were always some of my favorites to tackle. Designed for restaurants and liquor stores across the East Coast, these typically ran in standard 4″x6″ or 5″x7″ formats, with the occasional custom-sized layout. The creative challenge was always a fun balancing act: I had to seamlessly marry the established visual identity of the featured wine brands with the host venue’s aesthetic to capture the exact vibe of the event.

Because these were largely driven by on-the-ground sales initiatives, reps often dropped them in my lap at the last minute. Hitting those tight turnarounds meant being incredibly efficient with typography, layout structures, and asset management. To keep quality control dialed in, we handled the entire production cycle in-house. I’d prep the print-ready files, run them on premium cardstock, trim them out on the guillotine cutter for crisp, bleed-perfect edges, and ship the final deliverables directly to the requester.