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 make objects that have to read at six feet on a shelf and at one foot in the hand.

As art director across seven professional brands at L’Oréal, I touched a couple hundred SKUs a year and visited the printers three or four times a 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.