As a company that exists to provide meaningful experiences, the creation of an impactful brand has always been a priority. This creative process requires a huge amount of time, thought, strategy, and resources – brands are dynamic and require constant tweaks and updates.
After putting in a consistent effort to solidify an identity, making a more substantial shift becomes an all-encompassing undertaking. Everything the former brand has been incorporated into – any object, product or piece of media that’s been put out into the world, be it physical or digital – is immediately rendered obsolete. There’s also the risk of sacrificing recognizability, something that’s taken hard work to establish with customers. And, with so many internet lists of high-profile trainwreck rebranding projects available for our collective amusement, it’s clearly a gambit capable of being royally botched by organizations of any shape and size.
All challenges aside, rebranding is a breath of fresh air and introduces a new toolset with which to work. This revision replaces the logo we’ve used since we opened in 2014. As Creative Director, this is a pretty big milestone. Building a dependable brand is a necessity as we prepare for continued growth.
Over the past year, our visual style outpaced our former logo. The logo required a drastic update, but needed to maintain enough similarity to the previous design to stay recognizable. It also had to be versatile enough for a wide variety of applications: displayed on screens of all sizes, printed on merchandise and packaging, incorporated into our physical location, and more.
We set out to revise our logo with three major goals in mind:
Create a standalone emblem, an asset we’ve desired from day one but were never able to figure out.
Update our wordmark, maintaining the feel of our previous typography and more clearly asserting our company colors of orange and charcoal gray.
Simplify our name from The Brew Gentlemen Beer Company to Brew Gentlemen.
The BG emblem, created for use as both a standalone icon and alongside the wordmark as part of the overall logo, incorporates a number of our design standards: symmetry, center alignment, uniform line weights and spacing, and a heavy use of horizontal and vertical elements.
Our new wordmark is based around the font True Gentlemen, which I created as a bolder, more geometric alternative to our former logo’s Libel Suit typeface. True Gentlemen contains an iconic B and G that could be used for the adjoining emblem, and incorporates a cleaner and more structured look that falls more within our existing visual style.
As for simplifying our name to Brew Gentlemen, that just seemed like a prudent maneuver. It’s cleaner.
Since our initial decision to start a brewery, Matt and I were never able to settle upon a logo that fit our overall brand identity. The issue resurfaced time and time again, but nothing ever felt complete. A lot of imagery seemed too forced. Ideas never seemed to resonate. After two years of operation under our belts, however, we’ve learned a lot about the visual elements that make us who we are. By simplifying and expanding upon these qualities, we’ve finally found our logo.
As we grow into our new look, we hope that it enables us to better represent the experiences that we built this company to provide.
Cheers,
Asa Foster
Co-founder & Creative Director, Brew Gentlemen