Responses by Andy Kaul, managing director, Buddy-Buddy
Background: Thesis Brewing Project is located in Rochester, MN, a midsize but flourishing city best known as the home of Mayo Clinic. In Rochester, craft beer is still a new and oftentimes intimidating experience for many residents. With this in mind, the Thesis Beer founders wanted their brewery to be as approachable and inclusive as possible—a business directive that played an important role in our brand design development process.
Reasoning: Our design solution skewed towards personality and diversity, and away from a rigid design system made up of strict application guidelines. This resulted in a final visual identity made up of colorful palettes, a range of brand identities and a diverse illustration library. This isn’t an approach we often take on branding projects, but the team at Thesis placed their trust in our experience, which in turn gave us the freedom to consider an unorthodox design solution.
Challenges: The biggest challenge with a trusting client partner like the team at Thesis is taking seemingly limitless possibilities and focusing our team to execute a solution that performs its job for the client and community.
Favorite details: Any branding project where we’re able to introduce illustration is fun. The team at Thesis gave us over 1800 square feet of wall space for murals, three bathrooms for custom wallpapers, and branded prints and apparel for illustration work. We’re incredibly proud—but mostly just grateful to their team—for the amount of illustrative work that went into the final solution.
Visual influences: The client put a lot of trust in us to execute an aesthetic and vision we felt proud of. This enabled us to incorporate strong ideas and themes from past illustration work that we thought were compelling. Positive and negative space was a huge driver for illustrations as well as repetition of shapes. We knew that extracting a consistent hand shape would help unify the illustrations and offer a scalable solution to represent humanity.
Anything new: We began our work with the founders when the business was merely an idea. Our work continues with them today, months after their successful opening. Any time we can work alongside entrepreneurs throughout the “starting-up” process is a huge learning experience for our team, providing insights and invaluable perspective for similar partnerships down the road.
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