Also known as the Festival Of Lights, Diwali is the largest Indian festival and is celebrated all over the globe with food, singing, dancing, flowers, lights and fireworks. The Johnnie Walker team asked Butterfly Cannon to create a giftable and culturally relevant Limited Edition and Travel Exclusive design for its Gold Label Reserve blend, to engage with the thousands of people who travel each year to celebrate Diwali with their friends and family.

The design firm wanted to respect the history and traditions of the festival, while also creating a design that was a modern interpretation of Diwali and Indian visual cues, in order to disrupt and differentiate on the crowded shelves of global travel retail environments.

The solution was a contemporary twist on traditional Rangoli artwork — intricate patterns made from colored rice, sand or flower petals, that are an integral part of the Diwali Festival. Re-interpreted in a crisp, graphic style with a mixture of traditional and contemporary symbology embedded within them, the patterns were then sliced and reassembled as stylized rays of light.

For added sensorial effect, the intricate designs were embossed onto the tin, with key parts of the gold design executed in vibrant pops of yellow, orange and purple in keeping with the brilliant colors that can be seen everywhere during Diwali festivities.

The end result is a limited edition that reflects how Diwali is perceived in modern-day India, while also bringing the unexpected playful twist to celebratory occasions that is at the heart of the Johnnie Walker Gold Label Reserve experience.

The design codes established in the packaging have since been used across a wider Johnnie Walker Gold Label Reserve Diwali campaign, with Butterfly Cannon creating further visual assets to bring this to life.