Hello Friend is a brewery in Berkeley, California that’s all about sharing beers, art & friendship.
David Singer-Smith worked with the team behind the new brewery to establish a community-oriented brand – from naming and strategy, to package design, through the launch of their first beers.
Strategy & Identity & Packaging & Environmental & Social
Hello Friend is a
brewery for everyone.
Hello Friend wanted their brewery to offer an approachable and welcoming community – a perfect match for their drinkable, everyday beers. They also wanted to incorporate the wide artistic and aesthetic interests of their diverse staff and city. We worked closely with their team from inception to craft a brand identity that was representative of both their beers and their values.
We centered the brand around a flexible label system that features a different local artist on every can and used a unifying identity to bring these diverse styles together.
With the communal nature of the brand, the identity needed to be able to handle a variety of aesthetics and artists. Now, with more than 60 beers released, Hello Friend has featured illustrators, painters, doodlers, graffiti artists, ceramicists, tattoo artists and more – from as near as Oakland and as far as Amsterdam.
Every artist is fairly paid for their work (with money and beer) and has their artwork and other projects featured on Hello Friend’s social accounts. Twice monthly release parties give the community a chance to come together on the patio to celebrate good beer and amazing artists.
When developing the identity, we looked to common democratized art spaces like murals, community bulletin boards, graffiti art, and sticker-covered bathroom walls. These spaces can be chaotic, yet they capture a diverse and exciting conversation between people of all stripes.
With so many influences making their way into the brand and onto beer cans, a lack of consistency was something to watch out for. To help unify each of the artistic styles, we developed a primary color palette to be shared by all, and a flexible label template to ensure artists have room for creativity while important beer information always has a place.
Hello Friend is a growing brand, with each featured artist contributing a ‘sticker’ to the brand that lets everybody to be represented in the growing Hello Friend community. To get things started, we added few primary stickers that represented the brand’s core mission and their local community in the Bay Area.
Further supporting the brand off-pack are social media templates that tease releases and promote artists, branded crowlers for tap beers to-go, and keg collars.
To support Hello Friend’s launch party, we created a line of merch that included shirts, hats, enamel pins, glassware, totes and more. Working closely with the brewers and other staff, these items capture the playful and tongue-in-cheek attitude behind every beer they brew.
