WEEK 9: If there was ever a time a font drove the logo design and branding for a brewery, it would be for Norse Brewing Company in Wake Forest, NC. I worked on this brewery logo as a member of the Trade Ideas team and have been thrilled to follow this brewery over the last couple of years!

Beer Logo Type Fonts

The font for the logo type is PR Viking and was supplied by the brewery. It’s a clunky font which is difficult to use for sentences or paragraphs, but it fits this NC craft brewery so well. It looks like something Norsemen would use on viking headstones—so why not use it for branding a brewery?

What I love about this font is that is has real character and evokes a viking feel. It holds the identity of the brewery even without the primary icon.

Craft Brewery Logo and Identity Design

The design for this craft brewery logo came from combining the PR Viking font with a “Tree of Life” visual. We got the tree of life from a stock illustration, so full transparency that it’s not totally original. However, to make it original—and something that goes beyond using stock art, barley stalks were worked into the sides and a hop was worked into the roots of the tree. To unify the tree and brewery elements further, I “roughed up” the clean edges of the tree graphic to match the rugged nature of the font.

We also designed several variations of the logo. The primary mark is a circle with the brewery’s name in the middle, but secondary logos were created by placing the tree of life beside the text for a horizontal version, and a circular “seal” logo was designed with the name and location surrounding it.

Craft Brewery Photography

Some of my favorite brewery photos ever taken were at Norse Brewing. It was also one of the first shoots with my 50mm lens which provides sharp focus for closeups, fading everything else out regardless of foreground or background. Perhaps one day I’ll have a website portfolio with only photos of craft beer and breweries. Maybe I’ll call it Beer-Like Photos? Haha.