This project was the winner of an in house studio competition. The Studio, including Copy Writers, Art Directors, and all levels of Designers were split up into teams. Each team got 1 Designer, 1 Copy Writer and for this project 1 member of the marketing team. The Creative Director, Head of Traffic and Head of Copy came up with different themes and the teams picked them out of a hat. The ask was to create a new brand of whatever product was chosen from the hat. Our team picked whiskey, so we had to brand a new type of whiskey. We chose to stick with a Canadian whiskey but we wanted to gear it more towards the hipster crowd.
The K is made to look like an old, scrappy typewriter font and then the name, Kerouac, after author Jack Kerouac. The marketing people thought that the name would resonate with a hipster crowd as Kerouac's On the Road is a lifestyle that many hipsters strive for. Also, we developed the tag line "Meet the New Jack" early on in the project, and thought that was a great nod to the super popular Jack Daniels Brand, as well as making sure people knew our brand was named after Jack Kerouac.
Part of the ask was to make a stand alone logo and then an ad that could go in a magazine, online banner, billboard etc. We decided to go with a magazine ad as the tactile aspect of being able to feel the magazine pages in your hand is more hipster than the other advertisement options. Packaging was optional; when people saw our bottle in real life they said that they could really see this as a real product. It was so realistic that another team attempted to make a packaging box in order to compete with our whiskey brand. In the end, this project won the competition. At the time, I was a Junior Designer and it was a big deal in studio that I beat out two Art Directors, two Senior Designers and two Intermediate designers. I didn't stay a Junior Designer for long after this project.
The Creative Director of our studio voted for this project to win, and said she was incredibly impressed with the work I had done on this project.
