Project 3: Big City Noir Beer
Big City Noir was a line of craft beers created as part of a rebranding process for Hill and Sons Brewing Co. The goal was to design a contemporary promotional brand that would attract a new demographic of customers—this being movie-goers and fans of cinema. To market these rich, gritty-flavoured beers, they decided to create a trinity of gritty film noir-themed characters to represent the beers and sell them. These characters are: the Hardboiled Detective (Lager), the Femme Fatale (Ale), and the Mobster (Stout). The line of beers were sold in LCBOs and beer stores across Canada, and were advertised in flyers three months leading up to their release.
My role in this project was as designer and illustrator of the beer cans and box packaging. I worked with the client on the visual theme and what the best style of illustration would be to execute the concept, and we decided on a monochrome, illustrative style with a layer of noise overtop to give it texture. The dark and gritty imagery was decided to be perfect to represent the dark and gritty flavours of this specialty line of dark beers.
The typeface was hand-drawn and designed to be referential to the genre of film that we were spoofing—film noir. Noir is dark and gritty, which were the two words the client focused on wanting to advertise for dark beers.
The design was used for its intended purpose, in the individual cans and in the six-pack cases the client sold. They reported that people enjoyed the new designs, citing nostalgia and appreciation of the illustrations. Customers who purchased the product reported that the designs on the cans accurately advertised the taste and mouthfeel of the beers.
The primary challenge of this project was the layout of the can designs. While the illustrations worked on the six-pack box and on wide surfaces, some redesigns needed to be done to fit all the information necessary on a single can. I learned that creating designs in different sizes and dimensions is important first and foremost when designing a product such as these.