crystal springs brewery // rebranding

My John was working on a project for his marketing and operations classes as part of his MBA last semester. His group took on the case of Boulder/Louisville based brewery; assessing its operations and marketing strategy. Among other things, they identified the necessity of rebranding.

existing logo in use by Crystal Springs Brewery

Now, most would have no reason to know this, but John has an eye for design. I ask him to pursue this all the time - take on clients do not have the time to accept. He is that good. So, with a recommendation for rebranding, he went a step further and decided to show his "client" what that rebranding could look like. He worked up some logo concepts for Crystal Springs Brewery.

logo concepts designed by John Marty

John wanted to maintain the focus on the rich history of this brand, but give the logo more appeal. He ventured after a vintage-feeling logo as opposed to an antique one.

Now is the point he brought me on board. We selected one of the logos from the concepts he had drafted, refined it slightly, and said "this is it!". Typically the client would go through this process with the designer, but in this case John wanted to present the finished suggested rebranding to the client so we kept this process in-house, so to speak.

final logo in color variations

Next up we visited the packaging which was also identified as needing to be re-thought out. The existing packaging was found to be lacking in design appeal and also did not have a consistent design aesthetic.

Using our final logo, I took the helm and created some packaging mock-ups with the branding colors we had selected.

packaging mock-ups designed by John Marty and myself

Just as John went for a vintage feel for the logo, the colors we selected had a retro/vintage feel as well. In contrast to the existing packaging that has little consistency, we went for uber consistency here having each can follow the same mountainscape silhouette theme and just changing the brew style (i.e. IPA) and Crystal Springs specific name (i.e. "Marilyn").

This project was a lot of fun to work on for many reasons ... the industry and product are much different than my usual client. And, getting a chance to work with John really gave me the bug to work with him more - husband + wife design studio, yes please.