PACKAGING / BRAND IDENTITY
Illustrator, Dimension
Caravel Craft Brewery is a Calgary-based craft brewery specializing in European style beer. Their branding is inspired by artful, Old World designs. The Castaway Coffee Lager can label was created when the brewery switched from bottling to canning and needed shrink-wrapped labels for all of their beers. It was a popular beer that had previously been available only on tap. Caravel wanted something that fit in with their existing branding but looked as unique as the light coffee beer tasted.
Challenges
Caravel's label design had already been created and established by a previous graphic designer for sticker labels on bottles. Creating the coffee lager label was about taking an existing concept and making something fresh within those confines. This project was printed using the flexo printing method. This limited the color scheme to Pantone (which had not been used in the previous label designs), and as few colors as possible as each color comes with a cost. The previous designs were very intricate vectors, which is also not well suited to flexo, where the simpler the design the better.
Process
Early in the ideation process, it was decided to swap out the map in the background of the original design and replace it with coffee beans. Brown is the natural color choice, however Caravel had already established color-based branding to differentiate between beer products and had a brown label for a dark lager.
Because of this, coffee beans are featured where there are already brownish tones on the top half of the label, and then green coffee plant leaves on the bottom. The shade of green mattered though, in case the brewery ever did an IPA where green would be the natural choice.
Draft 1
Draft 2
Draft 3
The Final Product
Once the name "Castaway" was decided on for the new beer, a turquoise color felt like a natural island-inspired fit. It blended well with the existing line-up but the change in background made it look like the unique, specialty offering it is. This was and still is one of Caravel’s most-loved beer offerings.