When approaching other students on the course, I hid the 'brewing company' and most thought that it was for a garden centre.
However within my essay, I found that a lot of craft breweries use imagery of the area that the beers are brewed in to fuse a connection with the local residents. This is a concept which I believed to work very well and acted as a good foundation to build from.
Would the logo be more effective if there was an element of beer or it's ingredients placed somewhere in the logo? Would the illustration be more eye-catching if it had more details? What typeface would go with it?
I set off with answering the second question by finding a photograph of the tower and then illustrating it with a rectangular grid structure.
I liked where this style was going but it felt very blank and I was hoping for something with a bit more character. I realised when observing photos that is is build with large stone bricks and would be very windy because of its location in the West Yorkshire moors.
I developed the illustration by adding small lines to emphasise the bricks and at the same time, pulled some of the lines out of the building to illustrate wind. This was a much better outcome and lead me to my first question, how to implement the theme of beer within it? My first thought was an obvious one, but a very effective one too.
Throughout my essay I detailed how important hops are to a brewer and how they shape the character of most craft beers. Mallinsons especially brews with very hop-forward recipes that consist of either single, double or triple hopped variations.
For this reason, I illustrated three different hop cones to represent their importance in Mallinsons' products, as well as the three varieties of products that are offered.
Now there was an illustration element completed, it needed to be pulled together into a full logo by using the name.
Pushing the licensed name Mallinsons Brewing Company and shortening it to Mallinsons Brewing Co. felt like a lighter hearted representation of the business that would be more easily connected to it's consumers.
After playing with a few options, Gotham Bold became a fantastic choice for the dominating header font in Mallinsons' branding as it worked strongly with the illustration due to its clean cut corners and large bowls making it work well within negative space.
In regards to body copy typography, a different look was needed to break the space at the same time as a higher level of legibility and readability. A mono-spaced font would work well to represent the character and craft of this brewery. I came to the decision to use Fira Mono as it is an open source typeface which would realistically cut costs.
Once the typography had been chosen, I needed to pull both that and the illustration together to create the finished logo. First I thought i could compose it in the form of a stamp to highlight that idea of crafting. Instead of a circle, I tried using an oval, however this completely contradicted with the rectangular grid structure and the cut type.
I then tried boxing it up in a different layout and turning the illustration into a silhouette, however this didn't work because of it ruining the details of the illustrations.
Finally, I boxed it off in the same grid structure with added hierarchy portions at the top and bottom to hold the typography. The side edges were decorated like bricks to fall into place with the tower illustration and build structure within the logo.
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