<aside> 🍺 Crafting the brand identity for a Norway-based small home brewery that creates traditional yet modern brews from the heart of the fjords.
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Lead Visual and Brand Designer
Research
Visual Design
Brand Identity Design
Logotype Design
For those that know me even a bit know that I'm a big fan of craft beer, specially if there are distinctive elements that make it unique to the rest, and so it's the case of the beer brewed by To Hender (two hands in Norwegian) a small home brewery from Bergen, Norway. They produce all kinds of hoppy beer and variations of pilsners and lagers with touches of the nature resources from the fjords.
With this branding I wanted to represent the traditional and original feeling that something from the enigmatic landscapes of Norway should transmit plus a sense of technology and modernity from the processess and the approach to beer brewing that they stand for.
Beer should be more than an alcoholic drink, it's a tool to share between people, to build friendships, to make memories and so it should be visible that the two friendly hands hold a beer that will persist in time, more than as a drink, but as a moment in people's life.
The idea that came with this request was to come up with a brand identity that could be scalable, easy to use and applicable in multiple mediums, from printed to digital, in the manufacturing process and in the business side, keeping a consistent pattern that could be applied.
To Henger means "two hands" in Norwegian and that was one of the requirements for the design, to make some iconic representation of that fact that could be easily recognisable in order to achieve some branding presence, in the same way that other brands use very distintctive icons to be emblems of their brands.
In order to achieve that traditions yet modern look I had in mind I did a bit of research on how other designers tackle this by combining shapes, colour and composition. Trying to identify common patterns and trends in order to come up with a solution that would be recocnisable, consistent within the market and also stand out from more basic and simplistic ideas.
As per the brand identity idea, I started to play around with concepts and ideas that would be attached to the brand identity, one of them being the obvious relation between the brand and beer and secondly the fact that the two hands mean also concepts like friendship, sharing and making experiences. These concepts were represented in a mind map giving importance to each of the values to decide how to conduct the right conceptualisation.
In terms of the logotype and mark I started to take those concepts from the mind-map and put them into place, without forgetting the original motive of the brand I started to play around with the fact that two hands will always mean a human connection, sharing thoughts and experiences and this in particular, with beer involved, should also represent everything behind sharing a beer between two people. All this without forgetting the natural origin of this brand as well as the Norwegian roots.
After combining all those elements and work on the iconography and the mark in combination with all the information I wanted to display as part of the logotype
After a few iterations working on the composition of the iconography, the typography and the elements of the icon and sharing feedback and amendments with the client we achieved the level of quality and requirements that they were expecting and therefore started preparting the final concept for it to be presented in different mediums and platforms.
The final brand identity was a composition of the typographic logotype together with the tagline as well as the year of fundation, all this balanced by the mark composed by two holding hands holding a beet at the same time, this mixed with a playful combination of text and colour combinations provides a balanced environment of a modern yet tradition look and feel for the brand, targeting right away all those beer fans followers of unique brands using traditional methods with new technology.