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Stout Black Tea | Logo

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Tasked with making a logo/brand for a beer infused with tea I immediately researched the current brands in the marketplace. The key detail that kept repeating with the most popular brands was pairing of beers with similarly tasting tea flavors. This enhanced the natural flavors that occurred in the beer, while giving the consumer a new element to an old product. I decided to infuse black tea with stout beer. I choose this combination because they are similar, yet still are contrasting in nature, while still giving a unique take on stout beer.

Sketches

I went through about 60+ ideations of the logo before deciding on the first digital version. These ideations ranged from how should I shape the words “Stout black-tea” to how should I stylize its meaning, tone, emphasis, color etc. The chosen logo ideation then went through eleven more changes before the ideal logo was completed.

Ideas

First a symbol that was a mixture of tea and a stout beer was created.

Then after going through hundreds of brands of beers, I came to the conclusion that having a letter-mark  and a brush inspired logo was the direction to go. It would appropriately fit the style and tone that the brand was going for.

The brush quality would give a foam-esque style and emphasize rich qualities. The hand brushed aesthetic would also emphasize that it was a locally grown based brand.  To add to this, the “Stout Black-Tea” logo’s color scheme uses a dark brown for the prominent type, and a burnt orange for the background.

Picking the sketches that would best fit the brand, they were digitized. Another phase of ideations. In this stage of  the development, focus was on creating clarity with the letter-mark.


After talking to the client, they decided to choose #11.

Take away

This project was created back in my first year of college and was a major stepping stone for building my design skills; including research and typography. Overall, it helped me learn a lot about how details are the cornerstone of all good designs. Logos are meant to represent the client’s brand, and values. If you correlate these into the design, that is what makes a truly great design.