Alternative Medicine Brewing Company
Alternative Medicine is a brewery taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to modern wellness and its practices, wrapped in an "old-timey snake oil salesman façade."
We created a brand identity for them drawing on the sense of other-worldliness and magical thinking that prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century as supposed medicines & remedies flooded the market, claiming to cure the uncurable. Inspired by the rich design history of patent medicine branding & advertising, and tarot cards from the 18th & 19th century, there is a sense of flamboyancy in decorative details & typography. Texture, inspired by printing processes of the past, will bring depth and warmth to the style.
Role
Branding
Logo Design
Illustration
Team
CD: Philip Byrne
AD: Blàthnaid Conroy
Designer: Niamh Murphy
Logo System
AMBC's logo would have lots of different uses -packaging, merchandise, glassware, taps, signage, coasters, social media. We wanted to create a logo system for them, to give them flexibility and choice: larger signs and shirts could have more complex logos, while stickers and glassware could keep things simple.
The logo system allows us to repurpose the logo for different mediums- here, it's shown in two different style on their Twitter page.
Illustration
Poking fun at the hocus pocus of modern wellness, we've begun creating a suite of tarot-inspired, beer-centered illustrations, to ideally one day be used in a full deck of cards, and on large-batch brew labels.
Since the brewery is still new, and not currently printing custom labels for each brew, this key illustration is featured on exclusive shirts for top tier donors to their crowdfunding campaign.
Packaging
In the beginning, Alternative Medicine will produce smaller, short-run batches to experiment with their offerings and offer a larger variety.
There are three versions of labels, possible to be executed in all three colors from the palette, giving them the ability to still differentiate between batches if desired.
For bottle labels, they needed something flexible but still branded. We created apothecary-style labels with spaces for them to fill in the names, type of beer, and other info.
Spec Collateral
The smaller elements of the logo system provide lots of room to have fun with smaller merch or bar items. Shown here are potential sticker or enamel pin executions.