A mill, not a grinder. I gave that difference a brand: one mark, one gold, and packaging that explains itself.
Great products deserve equally considered brands.
A Phoenix studio founded by former performance automotive engineers. Three years of prototyping produced a mill that crumbles instead of shreds. It launched in 2020.
The product worked differently. The brand didn't say so yet. My job was to make that difference obvious.
Phoenix, Arizona
The category had conventions. The product challenged them.
Grinders cut with teeth. Flower Mill crumbles with a 20-flute rotor over a perforated plate. Drag to compare.
The product does something different, so the language should too. “Mill – Don’t Grind” became the line on every box.
Real renders of real parts. No leaves, no smoke, no neon. The machined aluminum is the most persuasive thing we have.
Most people meet the brand on a counter or in a shipping box. The packaging has to carry the product’s precision on its own.
The opportunity wasn’t to make Flower Mill look expensive. It was to make its value unmistakable.
Five approved color pairings and no others. Gold only sits on a ground with no other color, so it is always the one special thing.
A system built around intention.
Four primaries, three tube colors, one foil. A grotesk that sets like an engineering label, an italic serif for emphasis. The product stays the loudest thing.
C44 M45 Y75 K17
Black & Grey
Black & Rose Gold
Black & Blue
Short and factual, like a spec sheet. Both lines come straight from the production packaging.
White sweep, real hardware, a low camera so the flower faces you.
23 pages: identity, color, type, booth signage, every packaging format and the spec sheets.
Premium lives on black and gold. Accessories and Standard switch to white stock and one lime strip, so the tiers read apart across a shop. Every piece is a production dieline.
The details make the difference.
The Flower Mill team engineered the hardware. I made it legible: a spec layout for the guidelines and the trade, and a visual language taken from the parts themselves.
- Quarter-turn release
- Swap the ring for a pollen screen
- Holds 5 g with the ring
- CNC one-piece aircraft aluminum
- Medium mill plate
- Mills 3.5 g at once, no picking or tapping
- CNC one-piece aircraft aluminum
- 20-flute rotor crumbles flower
- Magnetic closure, low effort
Built to move. Designed to be remembered.
The original work was print and packaging. For this page I defined how the identity moves: four studies, four rules, one curve.
Portfolio extension · not a delivered assetInterface moves take 200–300 ms. Product and identity moves take 900–1,400 ms, slow enough to read as weight.
One curve everywhere, cubic-bezier(.22, 1, .36, 1). A quick start and a long settle, like a knob coming to rest.
Rotation always resolves to the mark’s upright position. Things enter from the edge they’d physically come from.
One moving thing per view. If two things move, one of them shouldn’t.
One identity. Every touchpoint.
Retailers met Flower Mill on sell sheets first. Same black header, gold mark and renders as the boxes, so paper and shelf read as one brand.
The booth footer carried the gold-leaf lockup at large scale. Booth rules: white background, one product image, Neue Montreal throughout, mark top right.
The product experience, in their words.
This mill is a game changer when it comes to ease of use and most importantly, consistency of the finished product.
Reviews from flowermillusa.com, written after this project. Owners describe what the brand set out to say: consistency, low effort, a result you can see.
What Apple taught me about restraint.
Apple's product storytelling set the bar I hold my work to. One object on a quiet background. One sentence that says one thing. Motion that shows how something works, then gets out of the way. Thank you, Apple.
This is personal inspiration. Apple had no involvement in Flower Mill or in this case study.
More than an identity. A foundation for the brand.
Real hardware, real materials, and copy that states facts.
The same mark, gold and grid from lid to sell sheet.
The flower works alone, on a 73 mm lid or across a trade-show booth.
Colorway, tier and contents readable at a glance.
Written guidelines the team can extend without me.
Most of this project happened in small decisions. Which way the label wraps. How much gold is too much. Whether the flower needs the word beside it. Flower Mill’s team trusted the process enough to let those decisions add up. What I took from it is simple: learn the product first, listen to the people who use it, and get everyone behind one direction before drawing anything.
When a client trusts the process, design can do more than change how a brand looks. It can change how clearly the world understands what makes it different.
