WEEK 8: Beer label design series for Pisgah Brewing Hazy IPA’s. Now wait a minute. That’s not a font, that’s custom type! You are correct, the numbers and lettering for this hazy series was hand-crafted specifically to match the Pisgah logo. (Well, their logo may have been designed using a font at some point, but it got really distorted and I couldn’t find anything even close. And before I spend too long searching for any design element, I typically roll up my sleeves and do it myself!)

Beer Logo Type Fonts

As I stated above, most of the primary letters, numbers and words were created one by one in Adobe Illustrator. Could I make an actual font some day from those? Yes, but that’s a topic for another blog article all together.

The secondary font used for the tagline, ABV, and other elements in the label design is called Amerigo. This is Pisgah’s corporate font and it has a great look. It looks so good in fact, that I can’t bring myself to use it on any other project because it will look too much like Pisgah. And that, dear reader, is what I call branding with type.

Craft Beer Label Design

The design for this series was definitely dictated by the style of beer as well as the blue ridge mountains since Pisgah is nestled in Black Mountain, NC. The problem with “hazy” mountain imagery is that it tends to look so gloomy, when hazy IPA’s are anything but gloomy. So how to marry a foggy mountain landscape with bright and cheery? How about we turn it green to really accentuate the hops. And then some simple, yet branded custom type would fit real nice, oh yeah. I just had to sneak the Pisgah three-hump mountain ridge line in there too.

As seen in the featured image above, the four label designs were purposefully created in varying shades of green. This way they each have their own little style, but look nice when positioned together. And while there were technically four labels in this series, a fifth was added for a Session Hazy with a lower ABV %. Another green to the rescue!

Will there be more Beer Label Designs in this Series to come?

Time will only tell! But I will say Pisgah has decided to replace the number and number signs on future label designs with a simple Roman numeral. And the first one is slated to be #4 (err, um, more like IV), so the mockup shown for #4 was never an actual label. Forgive me for adding this one—all others are real, I promise!