05Tidewell

Imagery

We don’t use stock or staged photography. Tidewell images are cut, flat, and hard-edged, like paper shapes laid on label stock. If you could not cut it from colored card with a knife, leave it out.

Art direction

One waterline

Every scene sits on a single horizon. It may be high or low, but there is only ever one.

Flat color, hard edges

Four palette colors at most. No gradients, shadows, or texture. Depth comes from overlap.

Bubbles rise and thin out

They are small and crowded at the base, then larger and scarcer toward the top. Never scatter them evenly.

Crop it close

Let citrus and glass run off the edge. A whole object centered on a plain ground looks like clip art.

Examples

Layered wave bands in deep teal and pale green under a large orange sun disc on a cream ground. — **Slack water.** The waterline at its calmest. Our default opening image for campaigns.

Hundreds of cream circles rising up a dark field, small and dense at the bottom, large and sparse at the top, with one orange bubble. — **First pour.** Bubbles crowd at the base and thin out as they rise. One in Peel gives the eye a place to land.

A huge cross-section of an orange cropped by the frame, with flat dark segments on an orange ground. — **Bitter peel.** A Seville orange, cut straight across and cropped hard. Shown large or not at all.

A flat tall tumbler on a table line, filled with pale green tonic, square ice cubes, rising bubbles, and a wheel of orange on the rim. — **The long glass.** Still life, side-on, on one table line. Ice is square because you could cut it that way.

A tide chart with three thick curves over a thin grid, labeled with times of day on a dark green ground. — **Tide table.** Our data looks like a harbor notice. Plot real figures and label them in DM Mono.

Crate liner. The cap in rows, one turned to the brand color. Used for tissue, tape, and crate liners.