Over the past two weeks we’ve had a lot of meetings. Great meetings. At different places. Beer places!
We’ve now met three times with Josh Mishell about branding, and have found a potential illustrator too. With their help, we’ll be able to put our vision into something creative, artistic, pleasing to the eye, and bad-ass-awesomsaucery-ness.
Last night, we took a field trip to Argonaut Liquors. We spent an hour or so walking the beer aisle, talking about anything and everything beer and branding. We looked at the macros and talked about what they’re doing, why it works, and why it isn’t for us. We talked about every single 6-pack holder, can, bottle cap, and additional marketing materials. Most importantly, we talked about what we liked, what we didn’t like, and what we wanted to do with our brand.
We came to the conclusion that we like simple, clean, yet a little bit weird. We like to stand out, quietly. We like to be loud, without yelling.
Pretty much, we want to get our personalities and the personality of our beer into a design.
I thought I’d share a few things we liked more than everything else. We’re not always very good at saying why it is we like certain elements, but we hope Josh can help us distill our thoughts into a creative brief. Here are some things we liked, and why:
Rogue
It’s simple. The brewery name is huge. The font is cool. It’s just a black background.
Boulevard Tank 7
We couldn’t quite put a finer on it, but Boulevard’s 4-pack carriers are awesome. Maybe a little too much pastel in color.
Left Hand Mixer
Most mixers are cluttered, with information about every beer inside. This is just the logo. The massive and simple logo.
Left Hand Fade To Black
Meanwhile they go with something that is pretty crazy, noisy, but at the same time they maintain simplicity. And that logo just sits there, all simple and nice looking.
Fort Collins Brewing
We really like FCB’s logo. The scratched look is very cool. The font on both the logo and the other copy is different and great looking as well.
Great Divide
As with almost every other thing about Great Divide, their branding stands out as some of the best in the industry. Simplicity, big fonts, basic colors. I’m also a really big fan of the knock-out characters they have for each product.
New Belgium
The new branding is similar, yet pretty distinct and different from the older branding. The step away from the classic and well-known blue and red is a bit of a surprise, but I do like the utter simplicity of the illustrations on the new stuff. However, that simplicity is at the cost of the story that each illustration on the older branding represents.
There’s obviously more awesome branding out there, and as we come across it, we’ll judge it as well. Next up, we need to look at tap handles and see what we like and dislike. One of my favorite of all time is Magic Hat’s wrought iron handles. Check this one out!
One thing that was really interesting, and I want to do more of, was watching people buy beer. Their choices, their thought process – at least what was visible – their reactions to three guys talking about every little aspect of every beer… It was fascinating.
What do you think of our choices? Anything you’ve seen that you think fits our likes so far?
Starting a Brewery 