I am currently trying to implement a Swing component, inheriting from JLabel which should simply represent a label that can be oriented vertically.

Beginning with this:

public class RotatedLabel extends JLabel {

  public enum Direction {
    HORIZONTAL,
    VERTICAL_UP,
    VERTICAL_DOWN
  }

  private Direction direction;

I thought it's be a nice idea to just alter the results from getPreferredSize():

  @Override
  public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
    // swap size for vertical alignments
    switch (getDirection()) {
    case VERTICAL_UP:
    case VERTICAL_DOWN:
      return new Dimension(super.getPreferredSize().height, super
          .getPreferredSize().width);
    default:
      return super.getPreferredSize();
    }
  }

and then simply transform the Graphics object before I offload painting to the original JLabel:

  @Override
  protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
    Graphics2D gr = (Graphics2D) g.create();

    switch (getDirection()) {
    case VERTICAL_UP:
      gr.translate0, getPreferredSize().getHeight());
      gr.transform(AffineTransform.getQuadrantRotateInstance(-1));
      break;
    case VERTICAL_DOWN:
      // TODO
      break;
    default:
    }

    super.paintComponent(gr);
  }
}

It seems to work—somehow—in that the text is now displayed vertically. However, placement and size are off:

Actually, the width of the background (orange in this case) is identical with the height of the surrounding JFrame which is ... not quite what I had in mind.

Any ideas how to solve that in a proper way? Is delegating rendering to superclasses even encouraged?