The Process

This project took over 40 hours of work, from initiation, planning, multiple iterations of designs, final mockup renderings, and the creation of a marketing/ social media plan.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

I came up with this idea from a happy accident. I’ve been in the logo design industry for a bit, and I’ve been eager to get into the craft beer industry. I was on my design Instagram account, look at logo inspirations and came across a picture of a pen drawing that depicted a direction sign. On the signpost, there were two wooden arrows pointing in opposite directions. One arrow had a beach scene drown on the paper attached and the other a mountain scene. After looking at them for a bit and thinking to myself that I would want to design that in illustrator the idea clicked in my head. The sign pointing in two directions is just like Two Roads, taking two paths less traveled. Some people during the summer like to go to the beach, others the mountains and from that my beer “Summer Adventures” came to light.

I started out by tracing the pen drawing to get the fit of the signs dimensions. I then built both scenes in illustrator and did a crop mask to make the scenes fit into the paper on the boards. I then needed to understand how I wanted the sign to fit on the bottle's label. So I took out my notebook and a pencil and started to draw my ideas out. I came to the idea of having the sign be on top of a mound and to have a sunset behind it all. 

But once I started to build that idea out, I quickly scraped it and turned to more inspiration. I needed to buff the idea out of what type of beer I would be selling. Would I only need to design one label or many? How do you package two beers together in the same pack? Do Two Roads have a different design for seasonal releases?

Problem Solving

After doing some research, I realized that most of Two Roads seasonal releases have a different design from their year-round brews. So I bought a six-pack of Miles 2 Go and Zero 2 Sixty so I could scan the packaging and design my labels using their seasonal package label. I wanted to make this beer as accurate to the Two Roads brand as I could. Once I got the initial framework done, the circular design started to form. A lot of inspiration came from the Miles 2 Go label because it had rolling hills and a sunset.

Once the initial design was complete, I ran into the problem of getting the colors just right. For the pale beach lager, the blues and tans were pretty simple to pick. But when it came to the color pallet for the IPA I ran into a lot of problems; I couldn’t seem to find the perfect match of colors. But after I asked my family members opinions and changed them a few more times, I found a color pallet the worked.

Another speed bump that I ran into was that I did not know what fonts were used on their labels and packaging. So I tried to match the fonts that they used with the closets type font I could find. Once finishing up the designs I thought I was ready to render out some mockups for the bottles. But I released it was difficult to understand what type of beer the customer was going to buy without ready the fine print. So I decided to add a smaller sign in front of the directional sign to indicate whether it was a lager or IPA. After completing that addition, the design I went with for the second sign had a 3D look to it and shading. So to keep both signs with the same theme, I scraped my original design and redesigned my directional signs using this new theme. I also thought to myself that having a sign with a picture of the location the sign was placed in was redundant. So for each bottle, I replaced the scene with a welcome sign instead of a copy of the location the signs were placed in.

PACKAGING DESIGNS

Now that I was happy with both beer label I moved onto the packaging issue. Two Roads have never released a tandem pack and the only other tandem packs I could find shows the bottles on the packaging. But following Two Road’s branding that would not follow their brand image. So I realized I had to create a third label using both color pallets to show that it was a tandem pack without depicting both bottles on the packaging. If you mix green and blue, the middle color becomes a blue-gray, and I used the color for the Two Roads outer design and the blended the two beer labels to show the beach and the mountains within the same label. Then for the direction sign, I removed both welcomes and had a sign showing the beach and the mountains. I also added the two smaller signs show the mountains has an IPA and the beach has a lager. 

Once all the designs for both bottles and both sides of the packaging were done, I brought my illustrator designs into professional beer mockups that I purchased the licensing for. I wanted to show off the two beers and the three different types of 6-packs that we would be offering. While doing some of the mockup renderings, I noticed small design flaws and would have to go back and fix them and then re-render the mockups.

MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

After the design phase was complete, I began researching how beers are made, marketing strategies and the social media presence of Two Roads and their competitors. I started to released that their social media presence was heavily dependent on their Instagram channel because that was where most of their engagement happens. Also looking at the social channels the content that receives the most likes are more authentic and visually pleasing post. For example on their Instagram, they posted a picture of a sticky note that had writing on it. Obviously, this post is not going to get a lot of likes on it because people can’t connect with it, whereas the posts of people enjoying a beer at their brewery receive over a thousand likes. 

After concluding my research I developed a description for both beers and a marketing pitch for my tandem pack. I also developed the idea of having a launch event for the beer before the world release. I came up with this idea because many companies do launch events, and from some of my research, I landed on many blogs talking and rating everything beer. So why not have a special night for these creators to show off our beer and our hashtag, to start the buzz about our new release a week before the actual release happens.

Thank you:

I hope you enjoyed my project and reading about the in which it took process to get to the final result. This project took countless hours that I could have been using on getting a reasonable amount of sleep. But when I am passionate about something I tend to lose track of time. If you have any other questions about this project feel free to reach out, I would be happy to have a chat.

Cheers,
Justin Markert