Dan Graves

I trained in fine arts before I worked in branding, and the habits carried over. Most of what I design is product packaging, which is to say my job is to create objects that are as arresting and read as well at six feet away on shelf as they do in hand.

As art director across seven professional brands at L’Oréal, I touched hundreds of SKUs per year and visited the printers three or four times per year, because design intent rarely survives the handoff to production without someone on the floor. For LVMH’s Moët Hennessy, I helped steer a new direct-to-consumer wine and spirits brand toward heritage and craft over glossy modernity. For Viva Tequila Seltzer I built the whole identity from scratch: name in hand, nothing else.

The through-line is medium-literacy. Restraint as a working method. Knowing how a bottle reads on a shelf, how a pattern survives at retail scale, how a signage system flexes across leases. I am most useful on full brand creation, brand renovation, and packaging-led identity systems, embedded or remote.