Saint Bernadine Mission Communications Inc. is a Vancouver-based agency specializing in branding, advertising, graphic design, and digital design.
Some of your sketches just say “Evil Vodka.” Were you party to that name change?
andrew samuel: One of the early explorations was inspired by the Prohibition era, and the belief that alcohol itself was evil. The distillery name would have remained Evil Spirits Distillery—it, and their products, would have been Evil Vodka, Evil Gin, etc., under the umbrella distillery name.
This project was hand lettered, but in a much different style than R&B Brewing. How does Saint Bernadine decide on an appropriate style?
The words “Evil Spirits” were created much in the same way that a word mark or logo is customized to be original and fit the brand’s aesthetic. This word mark does not have the same hand-lettering feel that the R&B beers have—R&B’s brand is all about having a handcrafted look. Style is largely dictated by the brief—Evil Spirits is a painstakingly crafted premium vodka, so the result needed to feel cared for and premium...and, evil.
How much do you rely on compositing with fonts before starting on custom lettering?
Not much. The early sketch word marks are sometimes inspired by other typefaces but are often imagined and custom to each bottle sketch. At a more refined stage, the resulting Evil Spirits word mark was inspired by a few different typefaces and created by tracing over existing letterforms, adding new elements and characters from other typefaces, skewing it, and tracing it again and again, trying new things until the desired look is achieved.
Were you able to show rough pencil sketches to the client or were the ideas more fully formed for presentation purposes?
Yes, things were kept rough and in sketch form until the approved Ouija concept. From there, it was a combination of a sketched label applied to a photograph of the bottle in Photoshop, with multiple color and word mark combinations done digitally after that. Once a word mark and loose color palette had been decided on, the actual digital artwork began.
product: Evil Spirits Vodka
client: Evil Spirits Distillery
design firm: Saint Bernadine Mission Communications Inc.
creative directors: Andrew Samuel and David Walker
art director/hand letterer/illustrator: Jennifer Hicks
medium: Ink and digital
country: Canada
Inspiration for Evil Spirits vodka comes from Ouija boards, and was born from the idea that alcohol was considered evil in the Prohibition era.
“We work on mood boards as a preliminary to the design stage proper, but after we have a rough conceptual and strategic direction” Samuel says. “Mood boards are a great way to start thinking and talking about design in a concrete way without having to do much work, and as such we treat them as a pretty fluid tool, allowing us to refine concepts and design direction very quickly.”
The final Evil Spirits word mark was inspired by a few different typefaces and was created by tracing and retracing existing letterforms, adding customized elements.
“Once the strategic direction has been set, we start sketching” Samuel says. “Working small and in pencil allows us to focus on elements like type and layout, bottle shape, silhouette, and design themes without getting bogged down with detail, color, etc. Again, the idea here is to work fast and generate a lot of ideas quickly. Once we have sketches, we cut them up and organize them thematically, and cull the ones that work less well. The best sketches then become the basis for further refinements, and so on. We work on multiple rounds of sketches, often four or five rounds, before finally moving to computer renderings.”
