Root Beer Label Design

Working on this design was really fun. The project consisted of coming up with a name, logo and bottle label design for a fictional root-beer company. I chose for my company to produce an all-natural type of root-beer, so it was important that the design reflect that.

Even though the root-beer is all-natural and healthier than most other sodas, I still wanted the name and design to be similar to regular sodas, as if this is the new all-natural drink, one that still has that cool, real-soda sort of edge to it. So Spiral became the name. It seemed like a word that had potential for being flexible in the area of design and that would be catchy and easy to implement as a soda name.

The logo (seen here in color, grayscale, and smaller sizes) needed to have a soft, natural feel. I began by using a lot of green, but this caused the problem of making Spiral look like an off-brand of Sprite. So I changed the main lettering to brown in the logo and later used lots of browns in the bottle label design as well. For the logo, I used the Gotham Nights font, which I made into outlines and adjusted slightly by increasing the thinness and thickness of the letters. I also added the white inner lines to add interest and give the letters a three-dimensional feel. The leaf, spiraling over to become the dot of the eye adds a natural element, and the hand-written font used for "All Natural Root Beer" also increases the organic feel.

The bottle became a real adventure as I set out to add some type of spiraling element to it. I eventually decided on having a curve in the label itself. There is a break in the wrap-around in order to emphasize this curve, which is the edge of the background behind the logo.

The ingredients in turn take on a spiraling format themselves, as they run along the edge of this curve on the other side of the break.

The finished product from different angles. You can see how the curve of the bottle label lends itself nicely to the idea of a spiral.