2022
Packaging
A can and carton system where one printed band carries a range of twenty-two beers.
Details
Hallow releases a new beer most months and had been redrawing the whole label each time. We fixed everything except a single printed band — colour, name and one line of description — so a new release is a half-day job and the shelf still reads as one brewery rather than twenty-two separate decisions.
Client
Hallow Brewing Co.
year
2022
Problem
Twenty-two beers, no range
Twenty-two beers, twenty-two label designs, none of them drawn by the same person.
On a shelf the range looked like a shop rather than a brewery, and every new release restarted the argument from scratch.
The brewery had grown by adding. Each beer went to whichever illustrator was free, and over six years that produced a catalogue with no shared geometry, no shared palette and four different versions of the logo.
The cost was not only visual. Every release meant new artwork, new plates and a fortnight of lead time, so seasonal beers were being planned around the printer rather than around the brewing.
Nobody wanted twenty-two identical cans either. The range is the brewery’s personality; it just needed somewhere to live that was not the entire can.
My Process
Audit
Laid all twenty-two labels out together for the first time. The brewery had never seen the range in one place.
Range Map
Grouped the beers by how often they are brewed, not by style. Core, seasonal, one-off — each gets a different amount of the band.
Press Test
Proofed the band on kraft and on white to check the colour held on both. Two of the greens did not and were redrawn.
Rollout
Shipped the core four first, then let the seasonals catch up as stock ran down, so nothing was thrown away.
System
A band that changes, and nothing else
One carton, one can wrap, and a band that changes. Everything above and below it is locked.
Twenty-two beers on four printing plates
New release artwork in half a day
Retail bags and cartons from the same band
The band is a fixed height at a fixed position, carrying the beer name, the style and a single colour. Everything outside it — brewery mark, legal copy, volume, the grid itself — is drawn once and never revisited.
Four plates cover the whole range because the locked areas are shared. A new beer is a band, which is half a day of work and no new tooling.
The brewery now releases seasonals on the brewing schedule rather than the printer’s. Two years on they have added nine beers to the range without calling us.
