Created for Daegu traditional liquor, this bottle design captures the city’s unique identity its advanced, smart-farm agriculture, its renowned herbal medicine market, and its textile heritage. Ingredients such as smart-farm-grown ginseng sprouts or local medicinal botanicals like Eomnamu can be placed into the drink as they are, celebrating authenticity rather than extracts. To make that ritual simple, the bottle features a bottom-opening structure that allows whole materials to be inserted and removed with ease while preserving the familiar presence of a classic liquor silhouette. A striped base cap provides intuitive grip and a refined tactile cue for opening, while the outer form is generated from overlapping, nested bottle outlines to create a layered, modern contour. The pour spout is wrapped in ramie fabric (mosi), adding a subtle traditional finish an understated bridge between Daegu’s heritage and its forward-looking, engineered spirit.
SCHERIA 2025
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The Daegu Traditional Liquor bottle begins as overlapped silhouettes, then is distilled into one resonant contour. Each layer holds a moment and place, forming a single “grain” a textured trace of stories. More than a vessel, it becomes a quiet outline of Daegu’s identity, refined into an enduring form.
This sketch explores a modular silhouette system where the upper and lower sections can be swapped to create variations with a consistent identity. Layered outlines are refined into one distinctive contour, while key proportions, thickness, and dimensional ranges guide engineering and prototyping.
Engineered with design-level precision, the bottle follows the golden ratio for a calm, balanced silhouette in hand and on shelf. A minimal closure integrates a locking silicone-ring interface to prevent leakage, uniting refined geometry with practical sealing.
Wrapped in ramie (mosi), the bottle’s spout carries a tactile signature of Daegu’s textile heritage an industry that has long shaped the city’s craft and identity. The fabric wrap recalls the familiar ritual of traditional liquor packaging, yet is refined into a clean, minimal gesture that feels contemporary. More than decoration, mosi becomes a material symbol: a modern reinterpretation of tradition that connects the bottle’s engineered form to the warmth of woven culture.
The bottom cap is defined by a fine ribbed pattern an intuitive, universal-detail grip that guides the hand to twist and unlock the hidden opening mechanism. In the transparent version, the base refracts and scatters light, creating a subtle, mysterious glow that shifts with movement. The cap system is also designed as a flexible signature: its form can be selected and varied to match each liquor’s character, from minimal to more expressive profiles, while keeping the same functional language.
With every cap component fully separated, the structure reveals a system engineered for clean use and long-term reusability. A silicone ring is integrated into the bottom cap to prevent leakage and maintain a secure seal through repeated opening cycles. The top closure uses a compressive inner cap to improve airtight performance while keeping the exterior minimal. All parts are designed for multiple uses and made with eco-friendly polymer materials, balancing practical durability with responsible material choices.
The label’s contour-line graphic visualizes Daegu’s basin landscape, turning topography into a refined brand motif. Foil stamping adds a quiet sense of luxury, elevating the graphic identity into a signature system. A calibrated red tone references the palette of Daegu-born painter Lee Inseong, grounding the modern composition in local culture. The outer cut of the label is intentionally irregular, echoing the soft undulation of fabric, while a typewriter-style typeface introduces a hand-finished, crafted feeling expressing the premium character of traditional liquor through contemporary restraint.
When an opaque body is used, the label’s atmosphere is translated directly onto the surface through monochrome silkscreen printing. The contour graphic and typography shift into a quiet grayscale language, preserving the identity of the label while integrating it seamlessly with the material. This approach keeps the composition minimal and refined, allowing the form, texture, and light to define the bottle’s presence.
Made in Daegu, Korea
This archival scene from Daegu captures a city on the move people gathering at the station as modern life accelerated and industry began to define the region. For a long time, even during major holidays and ancestral rites, Daegu had no local traditional liquor that truly represented the city, so families often sent gifts of spirits from other regions or offered different local specialties instead. As Daegu grew around urban infrastructure and factories, the need for a drink with a rooted, regional identity became clearer. Born from that history, this project introduces Daegu’s first traditional liquor made to belong to the city’s table, its rituals, and its evolving culture.
This archival view of Daegu’s fabric market reflects the city’s roots as a textile powerhouse rows of rolled cloth and patterned bolts forming the everyday landscape of trade and craft. Built on a long tradition of spinning and weaving, Daegu’s textile industry helped fuel Korea’s industrial growth, producing materials that moved from local workshops to national supply chains and overseas exports. More than a marketplace, this scene captures the rhythm of an industry that shaped the city’s identity: practical, industrious, and driven by the precision of making.
This storefront an old herbal medicine shop echoes one of Daegu’s most enduring identities: a city known for hanbang clinics, herb merchants, and bustling medicine markets. With such a deep culture of botanicals, Daegu had every reason to nurture medicinal rice wines and herbal spirits, yet its liquor industry remained limited. As an urban, factory-centered city, Daegu lacked the agricultural base that typically supports local brewing, leaving tradition more present in remedies than in distilleries. That gap is precisely why Daegu traditional liquor matters today reconnecting the city’s herbal knowledge and market culture with a new, place-based ritual of making and sharing.
This 1971 photograph of Dalseong Park captures a side of Daegu where tradition and urban growth have long coexisted a cultural city shaped by historic landmarks, everyday rituals, and a steadily modernizing skyline. Set within a basin landscape, Daegu is naturally embraced by surrounding mountains, while river flows trace through the city and temper its climate, creating an environment where fermentation and local food culture can take root. In this layered setting nature holding the city, and the city carrying tradition Daegu holds strong potential for developing a distinctive traditional liquor identity, one that reflects both its geographic character and its cultural continuity.
Suspended above raw stone, Grain of Time captures Daegu’s contrast natural botanicals and engineered clarity. Rooted in a basin landscape where mountains cradle the city and rivers trace quiet currents, the design frames traditional liquor as a dialogue between nature and modern craft. A bottom opening base makes whole-ingredient infusion effortless, honoring ingredients in their most authentic form, while the ramie (mosi) wrap leaves a soft, tactile trace of Daegu’s textile heritage. Reduced to essential lines and calm surfaces, the bottle holds a minimal sensibility: restrained, precise, and quietly poetic where tradition feels present, but never nostalgic.
Balanced between stone and timber, Grain of Time distills Daegu’s spirit into a quiet composition nature and tradition held in precise, modern restraint. The rough weight of rock and the warm grain of wood echo the city’s basin landscape and the slow craft of fermentation, where botanicals, time, and clarity settle into harmony. With a minimal silhouette and thoughtfully engineered details, the bottle feels less like an object and more like a ritual: understated, tactile, and calm capturing the meeting point of raw materials and refined Daegu traditional liquor.
A contemporary billboard concept that feels quietly handmade: the front panel is filled with handwritten notes, like a designer’s sketchbook scaled up to the city. Against the clean, modern frame, the bottle floats above raw stone linking crafted words with natural texture, and turning tradition into a calm, editorial statement. The result is an ad that doesn’t shout; it invites you closer, where nature, material, and story speak in a refined, modern tone.
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