Featured image for Artezan Brewery Serves Adventure With Each Beer

Artezan Brewery Serves Adventure With Each Beer

by Casha Doemland on 01/21/2019 | 3 Minute Read

Artezan Brewery is the first commercial brewery created by the Polish Homebrewers Association. Better still, their impeccably crafted brews deliver a story with each beer, starting with their Pacific Pale Ale that depicts a group of friends journeying through the tropics in a retro-styled bus. Dodo Tropical Ale displays a colorful cartoon of a dodo bird snacking on some tropical fruit, while Cymbopogon Wheat Beer illustrates little wheat and lemongrass like characters chilling poolside.

Each design is vibrant and playful while also descriptive of the heady brew found inside the bottle. To achieve such a look, Artezan Brewery reached out to fellow Poland-based branding and design agency Fuse Collective.

To uncover the creativity behind the branding, we spoke to Tomasz Maci?g, Managing Partner of Fuse Collective.


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Walk us through the design process, how did you go from start to finish?

We started with a discovery phase to help us understand the client – business context, products, market, goals, and needs. We did stakeholder interviews with brewery founders and desk research. Enriched with that knowledge, we set out to create strategic guidelines for Artezan brand.

We kicked off with a full day branding workshop with both founders, and we used various exercises to extract their vision for the Artezan brand. We wanted to define how the brand needs to be perceived, how it needs to act and behave, and what emotions it needs to evoke.

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All of this knowledge was synthesized in the brand guidelines. It defined attributes like personality, values, tone and voice and it explains how they'll translate to brand experience and communication both visually and verbally.

In the next phase, we created three distinct directions for the brand's look and feel on our style board. It's basically a mood board with references for major elements of visual identity – logo, typography, color, illustration, style and label layout.

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It also explains how each direction is rooted in strategic guidelines and how well it achieves the goals. This approach helped them understand the visual direction we’re heading before we started to work on label concepts. During the conception phase, we went over different iterations. We were playing around with illustration styles, their content and overall layout to explore different possibilities. When we’ve worked out the final direction, we started to work on labels and other brand assets.

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How did each type of beer influence the design on the label?

Each beer is unique, and its name tells a story that is relevant to the brewery. We wanted to capture something fun and interesting from it; the design itself is our creative interpretation of that story.

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How do your designs for this collection differ from other designs Artezan brewery has put out in the past?

Since the brewery launched, all the labels were created by the owner's friends. Each one was unique, but the consistency was off, and visibility on the shelf was poor. The logo wasn't prominent enough, and the brand recognizability suffered.

Offering a consistent and recognizable visual system was the major change and elevated the brand.

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