ALYSIA HILTON

I DESIGN THINGS

people walk up to, pick up, and remember.

Sixteen years across packaging, large-format environments, and print for spirits, retail, and institutional brands. I lead teams of designers from concept through production — including the constraints most concepts die on.

Role: Designer

Medium: Print

Client: Wild Wild West Casino

Program: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

Jack Daniel's needed one Halloween poster for a slasher festival at the Wild Wild West Casino. The festival was showing several films — so I designed four, in the visual language of the classic horrors. To pick one poster would have to pick a favorite, and tell everyone who came for the other films that their movie wasn't worth designing for. Neither language bends, either. Unlike the horror genre, Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 has looked the same for a century. Keeping the integrity of the iconic Jack Daniel's branding while still having fun with the theme was the challenge.

THE DECISION

Provide multiple designs inspired by the classics. Not four options to choose between — a campaign that matches what it's advertising. Same wordmark, same bottle lineup, same footer across all three; palette, rendering, and title treatment change completely. That's a series, not a set of variants. Make the range the cast. Fire, Honey, Old No. 7, and Apple line up across the lower third, lit from below the way a poster lights the people who aren't going to make it. Keep the blood off the brand. The lockup stays clean, the labels stay correct; the violence lands on the blade, the ground, the title, the glass. The whiskey survives the movie.

THE HIGHLIGHT

All four were produced and I got to see a killer movie festival.

Role: Art Director

Medium: Digital

Client: Jonathan's Place

Program: Illustrator, Audition, After Effects

Jonathan's Place serves foster children and at-risk youth in Dallas. Each year I take the footage they provide for their sponsor luncheon, isolate the audio, and build the film around the voice of the kids. The luncheon is a hard room — lights up, plates moving, everyone already believing in the cause. The film isn't there to persuade anyone that foster children matter. It's there to convert belief into a number. They gave me footage of children telling their own stories. The stories moved me. The video around them wasn't going to survive a ballroom projector. Underneath it is the question that decides what this kind of film becomes: how much of a child do you put on screen to raise money for them? Close-ups and a piano work. They also ask a kid who's been through enough to be the instrument in the pitch.

THE DECISION

Strip it to the voice. I isolated the audio and threw the picture away. Nothing I could design would improve on someone telling their own story. Set the words as they're spoken. Each line sits grey until it's said, then fills to white. Nobody is ahead of the voice or behind it — and in a room where half the audio is lost to a house PA, the text carries anyone who missed a line. Give the story a spine. Eight words run through the film in four alliterative pairs — suffering→safety, outcast→opportunity, abuse→aspiration, rejection→resilience. Each enters full-size, then rotates and docks into the margin. The structure does the arguing so the voice never has to.

THE HIGHLIGHT

They call me every year. Also, Sterling K. Brown watched it.

Role: Art Director

Medium: Brand and Packaging

Client: Bucking Bull Bourbon

Program: InDesign and Illustrator

A new Fort Worth bourbon came to us with one asset — their logo — and a launch date. I designed the brand, the packaging, and everything the opening needed: bar mats, flight boards, promo, and signage for a western bar where they'd filmed 1883. A new spirit has two rooms to win: the shelf, where it gets two flat inches against brands with a century's head start, and the bar, where the mat and the flight board carry most of year one. They brought the bull and nothing else — not a blank page, not a brand book. And the trap in Texas bourbon is costume: rope, rawhide, saloon serifs. Reach for those and you're dressed as a bourbon instead of being one.

THE DECISION

Build outward from the bull. It was the only thing the client already believed in, so everything else gave it room rather than competing with it. Design for the bar. A mat sits in front of someone for the length of a drink, not the length of a glance. Extend it into the room. The opening was at a Stockyards western bar with a strong point of view already in it. Fabricated signage would have looked like a visitor — and missed the timeline. So I sourced frames and distressed them by hand, finishing each to match the room.

THE HIGHLIGHT

They let me shop at Hobby Lobby on the company card.