When I was a young concept artist at Source inc. in Chicago, we revered Joe Duffy’s work on Classico pasta sauce. In the world of maximum shelf impact pop, this design stood out for it’s beautiful illustrative design and muted color pallet. It certainly was a paragon of emotive package design.

Fast forward to 2003. I had the opportunity to work on one of my favorite brands. Lipson, Alport & Glass ask me to design imagery for 1 of 2 concepts being developed.

My concept was evolutionary in that it borrowed heavily on the past label art.

Here is the final label design. The Shelf pop zeitgeist finally caught up to the Classico brand, but L.A.G.A. wanted to keep the charming woodcut look. But in the final analysis the client wanted to move even farther away from where they were. O well, it still was a fun project.

Here is some of the development work that led to the final comp label.