Smokeye Hill is a whiskey brand named for a cattle ranch in northern Arizona, where bootleggers hid their stills during Prohibition. The brand honors that history by making its bourbon and rye with Southwestern heirloom blue corn. They entered the market as an unknown distillery and won Bourbon of the Year at the 2024 ASCOT Awards. They came to us with a beautiful bottle, its labels designed by Stranger & Stranger, and a dire need for a brand identity and website that reflected the same level of quality.

We built a design system that carries that moonshiner heritage into the type and layout of the site, with additional art direction and illustration from Iain Burke. The site includes a merch store, a store locator, and a set of stories that go further into the brand's history.

We also recreated the bottle in 3D. The homepage scrolls through an animation that moves in on different parts of it while telling the story of how the whiskey was developed. A suite of seasonal renders tied to each product serves as hero imagery across the site and as social content.

I helped set the foundations of the web design system (type, color, layout and modules), designed a number of the pages, and worked with our developer Nick DiMatteo to make sure they were built accurately. I modeled, textured and animated the bottle and made the first suite of renders, which have been used in sales sheets, out of home campaigns, and across web and social. For the seasonal renders I took on art direction and technical direction, leading and mentoring Henry Allan, the talented 3D designer who built the scenes. I also contributed Houdini work that was layered into the Blender scenes, including ice particle simulations, snow pileup tools, and some subtle wildflower simulations for extra detail.