Tag: design

Brand codes and beer packaging

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 17th November 2024
3 Comments on Brand codes and beer packaging

How is it possible to see an own-brand beer and know which mainstream product it is intended to replace in your basket? That’s the power of ‘brand codes’.

Brand codes are the colours, shapes, words and iconography companies use to help you notice and recognise their products.

A rule of thumb we’ve heard is that you ought to be able to recognise a brand if two or more of its codes are present.

That’s why we know a can contains Coke, even without the name – because it has that shade of red and that white ribbon, for example.

The flipside of this is that you only need to rip off two or three brand codes to signal to buyers that own-brand product X is similar to, and just as good as, the real thing.

The most recent triumph from Aldi is a lager design to evoke Carling and also Coors Light – both produced for the UK market by Molson-Coors.

The brand codes ‘Carters’ borrows from Carling include:

the mostly-white can
the black accent colour
an angular font with a broken A
brewed in Britain
the two-syllable name starting with ‘Car’
geometric stripes and slashes
the general layout

Then, from Coors, we have:

the mountain
the pale blue accent colour
the mostly white can

There’s also, perhaps, a bit of Carling Premier, the nitro variant, in the mix.

When we asked people on social media platform BlueSky which brand they thought Carters was designed to bring to mind everyone said Carling and/or Coors.

SOURCE: Aldi.

Brasserie 1867, Grande and Shark Bay

There are others in Aldi’s current beer range, too.

Brasserie French Style Lager 1867 borrows its blue can, prominent historic date, red accent colour, and general Frenchness from Kronenbourg 1664 (Carlsberg).

Grande Spanish Lager is clearly inspired by Madrí (Molson Coors) with a mostly red label, line illustration of a retro-hipster bloke with facial hair, a very similar font and a name that’s sort of half rhymes with Madrí.

One of our favourite examples is Shark Bay Amber Ale from Lidl, usually displayed alongside bottles of Sharp’s (Molson Coors) Doom Bar.

This one is so similar that we can imagine someone picking up a bottle by mistake, if they don’t pay close attention.

Some of it is quite subtle, though: the silver shark sits in about the same place as the silver Sharp’s logo; Shark sounds a bit like Sharp’s; and the word ‘bay’ in all capitals looks, at a glance, like the word ‘bar’.

Craft beer brands are, of course, not immune from having their brand codes hinted at. Aldi has two beers clearly inspired by, and designed to evoke, BrewDog.

Anti-Establishment IPA is a hilariously literal take on Punk IPA, hinting at the original with the typography, the various shades of blue, and text highlighting that it is brewed in Scotland.

And Memphis Blvd, a grapefruit IPA, does the same for Brewdog’s Elvis Juice.

Brand codes into category codes

If brand codes are about helping you spot individual products (or recognise bargain knock-offs of the same) then category codes are designed to signal which shelf a beer should sit on.

In 2024, craft beer codes tend to be things like:

indie-style cartoon illustrations
vibrant colours, gradients and patterns
on-trend style-magazine typography
abstract, poetic, quirky names
cans over bottles

While trad ale codes might be:

‘heritage’ colours and tones
shields, crests and heraldic symbols
details in gold or silver foil
simpler, more straightforward names
or nostalgic ‘heritage’ names
bottles over cans

What confused things a few years ago was when brewers in the second category started borrowing codes from the first category in an attempt to muscle into that growing market.

That can be a problem when the beer in the would-be trendy can doesn’t match the expectation set by those codes.

And now we also have craft brewers borrowing ‘trad’ codes to help people understand where their new milds, bitters and porters fit into the scheme of things.

Main image sources: Aldi (Carter’s) and Molson Coors (Carling and Coors Light).

Tags branding, design

20th Century Pub marketing pubs

What is the Watney’s font?

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 9th June 2024
2 Comments on What is the Watney’s font?

Watney’s brewery might have disappeared but its brand lives on in the collective memory and people often ask “What is that font?”

The post-war Watney’s brand identity was created by the Design Research Unit. They were commissioned by Watney’s in 1956 and eventually delivered a pioneering House Identification Manual in around 1960.

This guidance included comprehensive rules on which lettering styles to use, for which purposes, in which contexts.

So, there’s problem number 1: there is no single lettering style but rather a whole set of different, complementary ones.

Problem number 2 is that these weren’t ‘fonts’ in the 21st century sense.

This is a bit boring, and tends to bring out the pedants, but here’s a quick summary of the terminology as we understand it:

typeface – related sets of letters and numbers in different sizes and weights, like Gill Sans, which comes in bold, condensed, italic, shadowed, and so on.
font – a specific style of a particular typeface, such as 12 point Gill Sans Italic. In the days of traditional printing, this would be a single set of metal letters.
lettering style – a design for a set of letters and numbers that might not be used in print at all but cast in metal or plastic, cut from wood, or hand painted.

The meaning of ‘font’ has changed, however, so that, these days, it usually means a digital file you install, such as Roboto_Black.ttf (a TrueType font), which can be automatically resized.

And what most people want to know when they ask about a font is which one they should buy or download for their computer.

With that in mind, throughout this piece, we’ll suggest some digital fonts that will get you close to those used by Watney’s, even if they’re not exactly the same.

The information in this post comes from two Watney Mann in-house technical manuals, House Identification Manual and Basic Elements.

We’ve seen pages from these reproduced in other books and online but were very kindly sent complete scans by Nick Stone, AKA TypeJunky, to whom we owe several pints.

The font in the Watney’s Red Barrel logo

How to layout the logo, from Basic Elements.

The famous Red Barrel logo has the word WATNEYS written across its centre in a style the manual calls Grotesque No. 9.

This style could also be used for, e.g., signs pointing to the toilets, or the lounge in a pub. But, in practice, that doesn’t often seem to have been done.

It was also allowed to be used for pub signs in specific circumstances – see below.

There are digital versions available.

The brand name font

The capital letters from Watney’s Clarendon Bold Expanded, from Basic Elements.

The style used to write WATNEYS was described in the brand manual as Clarendon Bold Expanded. But no other font by this name actually looks like Watney’s version, which is sort of curvy and almost cartoonish.

There is, however, a modern digital font called ‘Freehouse’ designed specifically to mimic Watney’s lettering. That’s what we used for the image at the top of this post.

This style was also used to write the names of subsidiary breweries such as Bullard’s, Phipps, Usher’s, Wilson’s, tying together the various companies that were added to the Watney’s family as the 1960s went on.

The fonts used for Watney’s pub signs

A comparison of the permitted lettering styles from Basic Elements.

A display of pub names from an exhibition at the Design Centre in London in 1966, from The Red Barrel magazine, August 1966.

A common complaint about Watney’s was that their pubs, and the pubs of breweries they took over, all looked the same. In fact, there were a range of different lettering styles for pub signs, with some loose guidelines for which should be used for which brand, in which parts of the country.

In London, Watney’s own pubs used a style described as English Two-Line Antique, somewhat similar to Egyptian Italic and, to a lesser extent, Festive. It’s a 19th-century-style italic slab-serif that absolutely reeks of post-war Britain.

The closest digital font we can find to this is Antique No 6 Black Italic from Commercial Type but, oof, it’s not cheap.

English Two-Line Antique, from Basic Elements.

An alternative was ‘Thorowgood Italic’, another 19th century slab-serif revived at around the time of the Festival of Britain. There’s a digital version of this available at a much more reasonable price.

Two plainer serif styles were also available: Clarendon, of which there are many digital versions, and something called ‘Modern No. 1 Wide’ for which we can’t find an exact match, but it’s in the Modern/Scotch family.

Finally, the red barrel logo font, Grotesque No. 9, was given as an option only for pubs “having narrow fascias” – because its letters are themselves relatively narrow.

Watney’s typography on packaging

A Watney’s beer mat from the 1960s.

A selection of branded items pictured in 1960, from The Practical Idealists by John and Avril Blake, 1969.

We don’t have copies of the manuals for this but grab any Watney Mann beer label or promotional item and you can see the same lettering styles being applied, with similar rules.

Handmade, not digital

If you want to recreate the Watney’s look for your own project – a beer label, say, or a sign for the pub in your shed, consider how you’ll avoid the digital look.

Digital fonts can be a great place to start. But back in the 1960s, signs were painted or cut by hand by craftsmen who painstakingly transferred the letter styles from manuals and pattern books.

This meant they were often subtly wonky or misaligned, with a somewhat organic feel.

And printed labels had ink bleed and other characteristics that gave them texture. There are lots of tutorials on this, like this from Spoon Graphics.

Tags 1960s, design, watney's

marketing

Fuller’s in the 1970s: funky but chic

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 12th February 2022
9 Comments on Fuller’s in the 1970s: funky but chic

We’ve been fascinated by Fuller’s branding in the 1970s for some time. If you’ve got a taste for retro design, it’s bound to catch your eye.

This photograph was perhaps when the sheer Life on Mars beauty of it all first really struck us.

The Anchor & Hope, London E5, in 1982. SOURCE: Terry Gilley/Flickr.

As we’ve acquired ephemera over the years, thanks to donations from people like Steve Williams (thanks again, Steve!) and our own finds on Ebay, we’ve started to love it all the more.

‘A Guide to the Fuller Pint’, April 1975.

The interior of ‘A Guide to the Fuller Pint’, 1975.

A Fuller’s beer mat from the mid-1970s.

A London Pride beer mat from the mid-1970s.

A Fuller’s promotional T-shirt from the 1970s.

There are a few obvious defining characteristics of the brand identity from this period.

First, there’s the typography.

We can’t identify a specific font used for the logo but it’s something like Formula (published in 1970) but condensed, with a shadow. Our guess is that it was hand-drawn, inspired by Formula, Caslon Rounded, Bowery and other hip, soft-edged fonts from the late 1960s.

Secondary text is often in a sans serif font that looks to us like Univers or some derivative.

Then there are the colours: what could be more seventies than orange, brown and yellow? (Maybe they could have got avocado in there somewhere if they’d really tried.)

It feels very clearly like an attempt to modernise the brewery’s image, at a time when it was considering ditching cask ale altogether and going all keg. The bosses at Fuller’s wanted a bit of that Watney’s and Whitbread action – to be part of the world of Bird’s Nest pubs and the Chelsea Drugstore. (See 20th Century Pub, chapter five, for more on that.)

What we can’t quite work out is when this branding applied. This beer mat was, we guess, produced very early in the 1970s at around the time this new beer was launched.

An ESB beer mat from, we think, c.1971.

It uses different type and a different logo but the colours are already in place.

By 1974, at the latest, the rounded logo was appearing on packaging and point of sale material, as in this image taken from the brewery’s official history published in 1995.

SOURCE: London Pride, Andrew Langley, 1995.

At the other end of the decade we find some more traditional serif fonts creeping back in, along with a trendy ‘swash’ style that you might recognise from the cover of LPs and paperbacks from the period.

A Fuller’s pub guide from c.1979.

This London Pride beer mat is of a similar vintage and is certainly starting to look more ‘real ale’ and hinting towards the 1980s. London Pride is in Souvenir Bold, or similar.

London Pride beer mat c.1979.

This leaflet is an update of the yellow wonder above, from c.1979/80, and showcases a new slogan: ‘For a taste of tradition’. The rounded logo is still there, along with the Ford Capri go-faster stripes, but beginning to look a bit dated. The illustrations in the leaflet are all brown and beige, folksy rather than mod.

Fuller’s pub guide from c.1979.

By the end of the 1970s, Fuller’s had been embraced by, and was embracing, the Campaign for Real Ale and the culture that went with it. Its modern-style pubs were being Victorianised and it wouldn’t be long before those big enamel and brass pump-clips would arrive on the scene.

As if that brief attempt to be trendy never happened.

Tags 1970s, design, fuller's

pubs

Wiggets, greebling, useless shelves and the texture of pubs

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 10th November 2020
9 Comments on Wiggets, greebling, useless shelves and the texture of pubs

Pubs are anti-minimalist by nature and texture sometimes matters more than function.

In the 1960s, special effects technicians working on spaceships for Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation shows realised that they could make them more realistic by covering their surfaces in small, functionless details taken from plastic model kits. They called them ‘wiggets’.

When a similar approach was taken during the making of Star Wars a decade later, however, the term ‘greebles’ was adopted, and stuck, and the process came to be known as ‘greebling’.

In pub decor there’s a form of greebling, too.

When Ray worked as a teenage waiter at a Brewer’s Fayre pub in Somerset in the early 1990s, he got roped into pre-launch preparations and was on site the day the truck turned up with boxes of books and antiques to go on the walls.

“Where do you want this scythe?”

“Top shelf, out of reach, and make sure you anchor it with a couple of cable ties.”

If you stop and look at the books on the shelves, or investigate the artefacts, you’ll find they rarely stand up to scrutiny.

Collections of Reader’s Digest abridged novels are popular because they were designed to look ‘classy’ – leather-effect, gilt-style yellow metal embossing, and so on. You might also find 1970s doorstop novels with their dust jackets missing, or faux-luxury editions from the Marshall Cavendish Great Writers Library part-work.

It doesn’t matter, though – not really. They absorb light, break up expanses of plaster and, crucially, soak up sound.

And it goes on.

That old carpenter’s plane is just… an old carpenter’s plane. Back of the garage, car boot sale, any-item-one-pound rusty crap. Those ‘vintage’ biscuit tins around the ceiling are 1990s reissues. The Edwardian-style enamel signs on the walls include rust printed on at the factory. The nicotine vignetting has been painted onto the walls.

In the 1980s, such was the demand for greebling for Irish pubs that the supply ran dry and an entire industry arose to supply brand new Gaelic-themed gubbins by the kilo or by the metre.

Again, it doesn’t matter: as long as these items cast shadows, provide splashes of colour and suggest, in the periphery, depth and detail, they’re doing their job.

What this kind of greebling aspires to, of course, is the genuine, accidental clutter of really old pubs.
The Bridge Inn at Topsham, The Blue Anchor in Helston or Brasserie Verschueren in Brussels can’t help but have texture and their surface details aren’t glued on.

Unless they are, of course. The great thing about contrived greebling is that it only takes a decade or two to look as if it’s been there forever, and for fake greebling to attract the real thing as regulars present offerings as tokens of love.

Perhaps the value of greebling is that it suggests continuity – that a pub has been under the same ownership for more than a year or two, at least.

Tags decor, design

20th Century Pub pubs

The Champion, Fitzrovia: a Victorian fantasy

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 7th September 2020
1 Comment on The Champion, Fitzrovia: a Victorian fantasy

Until we started studying pubs it had never occurred to us that The Champion was anything other than a wonderfully preserved Victorian survivor.

Leaded windows, glinting mirrors, polished wood and ornate details that give a thousand layers to every shadow – it’s one of those places that makes you suspect that, at any given moment, a hansom cab might be passing in the street outside.

In fact, it’s a product of the 1950s and the flowering of art and design that followed the Festival of Britain.

The Festival, which took place in 1951, was intended to reignite British pride and optimism. Its various guiding creative hands concocted a unique style that overlaid elements of the Victorian (especially typography) onto economical, prefabricated modernism.

Having survived the war, The Champion looked a bit sad in the early 1950s. An earlier inter-war makeover had brought it in line with prevailing ideas of cleanliness and simplicity – wipe clean, plain.

The Champion before its 1954 refurbishment.

In 1954, Barclay Perkins commissioned architects and designers Sylvia and John Reid to bring it up to date by taking it back to the newly fashionable 19th century.

These days, the Reids are best known for their Scandinavian-style S-Range furniture, now manufactured by their son, Dominic, which indicates where their hearts lay: they were modernists, not nostalgists.

Accordingly, they told the brewery that they didn’t intend to create a straightforward pastiche or reconstruction of a Victorian pub. Instead, their plan was to identify what made pubs feel pubby and then achieve the same atmosphere with modern materials and craft.

There were even rumours, says fellow pub designer Ben Davis in The Traditional English Pub, 1981, that the Reids got the final say in choosing the couple who were to run the pub, keen to ensure that they were the right type.

“It can – indeed it should – be in the best of taste, but it must be larger than life, an exaggeration of the interiors its customers know…”

In his book English Inns, from 1963, Denzil Batchelor compares The Champion to The Sherlock Holmes, one of the first theme pubs, and seems unconvinced:

The Champion… is an example of a Victorian pub as beautifully reconstructed as the arena of a chariot-race in a billion dollar film. THe beer-mugs are authentic as the handles of the beer-engines. To visit it to pay a Chinese respect for your grandfather’s memory… [But for] all their merits you could hardly call The Champion or The Sherlock Holmes unselfconscious.

Generally speaking, though, people seemed to like it, not least as an antidote to the unabashed, stark modernism of many post-war pubs.

Alan Reeve-Jones says, in his snarky 1962 guidebook London Pubs, that “The work was carried out with such skill that it takes an expert eye to see where the old left off and the new began looking like the old.”

Official photographs of the newly refurbished Champion, without drinkers in the way of the detail, do indeed reveal a blend of old and new.

Etched windows evoke the Victorian era while at the same time employing the kind of lettering very much in fashion after the Festival of Britain. Gill Sans was out, a relic of the 1930s; modern adaptations of the kind of bold typefaces seen on Victorian posters were in.

More of the same can be seen over the bar, advertising mild ale, best bitter, DBA and lager – a nice snapshot of the move towards ‘premium’ beer styles in the 1950s.

There’s lots, in fact, that would become standard in pub makeovers in the decades that followed. Leather seating, barrels as decoration, and vintage mirrors doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The funny thing is that The Champion today isn’t the Reids version – it’s a later refurb that does exactly what they wouldn’t. Pure Victorian pastiche. The modern arts-and-crafts they commissioned have gone, from the painted sign on the exterior to the modern-retro window designs.

A useful reminder, at least, that much of what evokes The Olden Days in British pubs is rarely more than 30 years old.

Images, details and quotes from A Monthly Bulletin for January 1955.

Tags design, pub design