My project for course: Calligraphy and Gestural Lettering for Packaging Projects

Concept study of developing a beer label design with gestural lettering

"Murauer" is an existing Austrian beer brand. For my concept study, I took this traditional beer identity and created a completely different branding.

My approach: To develop hand drawn aesthetics and a casual look and feel based on expressive brush calligraphy with a rough texture. The existing brand has no illustrative elements in its packaging design. However, I developed several hand drawn items to add to the new logotype.

Working process

1. As shown in this great class, I drew the main part of my logotype (which is the word "Murauer") again and again with a pentel ink brush pen to achieve the best results I was looking for.

2. Based on my favourite versions, I created a single result with pencils which I used as template to work on in Adobe Illustrator. In my case, I did not use the image tracer. I vectorized my pencil drawn sketch with the pen tool as precisely as possible.

3. I used the print out of my final result as template to generate textured versions of it with the pentel ink brush pen.

4. I selected 5 different results with hand drawn textures, scanned them in, went to my MAC and used parts of these textures in Adobe Photoshop to place them on my perfectly vectorized logotype.

5. The next thing I did was image tracing the textured psd file in Adobe Illustrator to receive a final vectorized version to go on with for my planned beer label.

Additonal elements

The next things I worked on were:

- hand drawn illustrative elements
- the hand lettered and textured subline
- finding appropriate fonts to match the hand drawn logotype
- creating a monogram in order to develop a nice and cool pattern for my beer packaging

Conclusions

I think it is always a cool thing to make mock ups with all the necessary items you created and see how they would look in real life.

I enjoyed this workshop by Augusin Pizarro Maire a lot. It really supported me a lot to see his working process and to get to know how he transfers textures on his letterings. Yes, the process is quite time consuming, but in my opinion the result is worth all the efforts that are done before.