VII Hills is an Italian dry gin distilled with botanicals. The brand needed a campaign that would transform the ritual of cocktail-making into something collectible, visual, and multi-sensory. Something that would live beyond the bar counter and into people's hands, walls, and ears.

The ask: a series of cocktail recipe cards that feel like art, sound like a place, and function as a portable brand world. Each card would celebrate a signature VII Hills cocktail while embedding the brand's identity into a single, cohesive visual language, one that could extend across print, digital, packaging, and physical space.

Piet Mondrian reduced the visible world to its purest elements, horizontal and vertical lines, primary colours, and the tension between them. We saw the same philosophy in cocktail-making: a finite set of ingredients, combined through precise proportions, creating something that transcends the sum of its parts.

Each cocktail was deconstructed — not in the culinary sense, but compositionally. The glass becomes geometry. The liquid becomes colour fields. The garnish becomes an accent block. The result: five distinct compositions where you can read the drink's character through pure abstraction.

The grid is ever-present, black lines of varying weight subdivide each card into zones. But unlike Mondrian's precise geometry, these lines carry a hand-drawn, ink-brushed texture. This deliberate roughness signals that these are crafted objects, not machine-made. The human hand is always visible, just as it is in the act of making a drink.

Five cocktails. Five compositions. One visual language.

01 | Espresso Martini

The martini glass splits the composition diagonally — dark espresso crowning a rose-pink vodka layer. Orange and yellow accent blocks evoke the warmth of a Roman afternoon coffee ritual. The black grid anchors it all in architectural precision.

02 | Martini

The most minimal card in the series. A single pink triangle of liquid sits beneath a tiny green olive square. The composition breathes, reflecting the martini's own philosophy: nothing to hide behind, every element exposed, every proportion critical.

03 | Negroni Italiano

The heaviest composition. A bold teal block of gin sits atop a sweeping pink-red field of Campari, capped by an orange vermouth strip. The tumbler shape is implied through stacked rectangles. Unapologetically dense, like the drink itself.

04 | Gin and Tonic

A descending cascade of colour blocks, yellow, orange, teal, and a dramatic pink triangle, creates a staircase rhythm. The composition captures the effervescence of tonic and the layered botanicals of VII Hills, a drink that unfolds as you sip.

05 | Bloody Mario

VII Hills' Italian twist on the Bloody Mary. The most complex card, with the most colour blocks. Green celery, dark tomato, teal seasoning accents, and pink spice vie for space in a crowded, energetic grid. Controlled chaos, like the drink's flavour profile.

Mondrian saw painting as frozen music. We reversed the equation, giving each card its own ambient layer that captures the mood, setting, and ritual of the cocktail experience. But rather than five individual soundscapes, we distilled the sensory world into four elemental frequencies that cut across the collection.

The crunch of gravel underfoot, distant cowbells, thin alpine air, the echo of a valley. This soundscape captures the botanical origin story, the hillsides and slopes where juniper and wild herbs grow. It grounds the collection in landscape, in terroir, in the earth the gin comes from.

The crackle of a hearth, the low hum of a flame beneath a copper still, embers settling. Fire is transformation — the heat of distillation, the warmth of an evening drink, the intimacy of gathering around light. It maps to the darker, richer cocktails in the collection.

Water is the element that dissolves structure, the tonic that opens the gin, the ice that shifts in the glass, the pour that begins every ritual. This soundscape pairs the most fluid visual in the series with the most patient sound.

Wind is the invisible ingredient in every outdoor drink, the thing that carries the botanicals' scent from glass to nose, that cools the first sip on a terrace, that makes atmosphere feel physical. The most minimal animation in the series, paired with the most expansive sound.

The Deconstructed Cocktails campaign turned recipe cards, traditionally a disposable bar format, into collectible brand artifacts. By anchoring the visual identity in the language of 20th-century abstract art, VII Hills positioned itself not just as a gin, but as a cultural object, a spirit with a point of view.

The ambient sound layer elevated the campaign beyond print into experience design. The four elemental soundscapes, mountain steps, fire, water, wind, created a bridge between the physical card in your hand, the drink in your glass, and the landscape in your mind. Each card became a portal: a flat object opening into a world of taste, sight, and sound.

The Mondrian grid proved endlessly extensible. The same visual language scaled from cards to coasters, cocktail menus, social media, event installations, and limited-edition packaging, giving VII Hills a design system as rigorous and versatile as the spirit itself.