At OzSale, our Director of Digital Marketing, Jim Lees, is a pretty cool guy. In 2015 he briefed me to develop a label for his IPA home brew, marketed as 'Rutlanshire Brewers Guild'. Jim's English. From Rutland... hence the name. 

The brief was to create something nostalgic, throwing back not only to Jim's English roots, but the English roots of IPA itself. Challenge accepted.

In terms of process, I began with research. I learnt that Jim's hometown has a county flag. The flag contains a golden horseshoe and a varying number of golden acorns set on a solid emerald green background. I moved on to the county motto - "much in little".  smallest county in England.

This motto (in combination with the 'nostalgic' brief) lead me to maintain a more detailed, but still balanced look and feel, conceptualising Rutlanshire in the branding using the horse shoe elements. Funny enough, hops actually look like acorns too, so I worked in the stylised wheat chaffs around the acorn lock up.

I also learnt that, historically, Indian Pale Ale is not actually Indian... IPAs started life as 'tweaked' UK beers designed to survive 6 month's sailing to India for the British colonists there. Using this as a basis I decided to include an illustration of a tall ship, set in a deep maroon colour as a link to the IPA's dark amber tone. I wanted the label to correspond with the logo fluidly, but still retain enough flexibility that if Jim wanted to expand his brewing operations to other beer varieties, we could easily make enough distinction in the future labels. This would simply involve altering key imagery and corresponding colour selections. 

Needless to say, Jim was stoked.