Beer Label Start to Finish

Our class was given an assignment to design a beer label. The project was quite open for whatever you wanted to do. I chose to do a irish dark stout beer. I got inspiration from the well known popular dark stout irish beer Geniouss. After looking up the history and heritage behind the label,logo and design system that Geniouss has,I decided to do a rival beer that would be doing the opposite of what Geniouss was. Geniouss's logo is a harp that is a symbol of Ireland based on folk lore. Therefore, I based my logo and design based off of the irish story of the Dullahan. In Celtic folklore, Dullahan is a headless spirit riding a black horse, holding his constantly-rotting head under his arm. His horse wagon's wheels are made of thigh bones, and his whip is made of a human spine, which he uses to slash the eyes of his victims. You cannot keep out the dullahan with locks or gates; they open upon his arrival. What does keep Dullahan away, however, is gold, no matter how much. The only time he stops riding is when he is near the person due to die. He calls out their name, and they instantly die. However.. do not watch Dullahan ride. If you watch him while he collects souls, he throws a bucket of blood on you... A sign that you are the next to die. Therefore, I really wanted to incorporate the horse, the headless spirit and the spin whip. First I started with a silhouette....

After that I decided that the symbol wasn't coming across strongly as a silhouette so I added some but minimalist detail.

This was a good direction, it was a traditional beer label, so i began to work with something a little more modern, and added Gold to the end of Dullahan.

Which lead me to something that looked like this after playing around with the idea of tying the horse and words together.I also pick a font called celtic Garamond since my beer was irish I though making the font look gaelic would be a good idea.

Once, I got the basic idea of what I wanted my type and and symbol to look like I started to work it into a label.

I was sold on not adding any colour to the design, I wanted it to be really dark and mysterious. However, I was convinced on adding a gold leaf texture in photoshop. Which complimented the name and story of the Dullahan.

Which lead me to my final design.

Now it's time to work on the beer package and poster!