Cholula Hot Sauce
Three consecutive years as lead designer on the Uncap Real Flavor campaign — national TV, chalk-on-slate print, social, and broadcast
Case Study · Cholula Hot Sauce
Three years as lead designer on the Uncap Real Flavor campaign
At Spitball Advertising, I grew into the lead designer role on the agency's biggest accounts. Cholula was the one I returned to for three consecutive years — the Uncap Real Flavor platform ran across print, social, broadcast, and national TV, all anchored by a distinctive chalk-on-slate visual system I developed and owned.
Campaigns · Art Direction · Print · Video
The brief
Cholula needed to compete against larger hot sauce brands with bigger budgets. The brief was to lean into authenticity and craft — a brand that looked handmade and warm, not manufactured. The visual language had to travel across everything from in-store displays to 30-second TV spots without losing the feeling.
Print system
The chalk-on-slate visual language and illustration library
I developed the chalk-on-slate visual system — hand-rendered typography, textured surfaces, real food photography with a deliberate, artisan aesthetic. Every flavor illustration in the system is one I digitally drew from scratch: each ingredient, each pairing, each SKU. As the illustration library grew, I built an asset library for agencies to download illustrations as I produced them and managed it for two years — so any agency in the Cholula ecosystem could pull the right asset without starting from scratch.
Digital and social
The platform extended to every channel
The visual system extended into social, digital, OOH, and promotional activations. MLB Gameday tie-ins, drag-and-drop interactive social executions, and platform-native social formats all inherited from the same chalk-on-slate foundation. Consistency across channels was the discipline.
TV broadcast
Art directing the national commercial
The national TV commercial brought the aesthetic into motion. I art-directed the visual treatment: the camera work, the surface textures, the typography integration, the color grading. The spot ran across broadcast and was extended into social and digital cuts. The print ads ran alongside — same chalk-on-slate system, real quotes from real Cholula fans.
Reflection
Three years on the same platform is rare in agency work. It meant the system had to grow — not just repeat. Each year we pushed the visual language a little further while protecting what made it distinctive. Learning to evolve a campaign without breaking it is a discipline I've used in every brand system job since.
Next project
Raw Generation