The first label I designed for Destination Unknown Beer Company. This double New England IPA was double dry hopped with Mosaic Lupulin powder. Lupulin powder is extracted from the hops, and that’s the only thing that was used for this beer, hence the Abuse of Powder.

The owners of Destination Unknown trust me with my creativity in designing their labels. I always ask if they have any ideas first, and Chris, the head brewer and co-owner, suggested Lady Justice holding the scale, with powder outweighing hops. I’m glad I asked, because I’m not sure I would have thought of such a perfect metaphor for this beer.

In the Science of Selling… series by Destination Unknown, I designed my second label for them - Science of Selling Space Junk. I wanted to get a little crazy with this one, and I ended up using Photoshop for a lot of the work. I’ve learned from my mistake, and have since relied mostly on Illustrator, because the labels were not as crisp and clear without fully vector artwork.

As DUBCO became the acronym for Destination Unknown Beer Company, the brewery wanted to make a larger mass market type of beer. DUBCO IPA is more of a west coast style IPA, and holds up strong against most IPA’s these days.

I wanted to show where this beer originates from on Long Island, so the Robert Moses bridge was a no-brainer.

As I had only designed 16oz labels thus far, I continued to use the same layout, only to find out shortly before the can release that these would be 12oz cans. Adjustments were made in the design to accommodate a smaller label during the week of the release. I’m extremely happy with the result, and the good-beer-drinkers of Long Island tend to agree.

This limited edition beer was released on Destination Unknown’s three year anniversary. As the label states, it’s a Lemongrass Saison aged in Chardonnay Barrels. Tons of flavor are in this beer, but I didn’t want to go over the top on the design of the label. With the obvious sonar/radar imagery, I knew something was missing from a creative standpoint.

I mentioned this to my fellow coworkers at DUBCO, and John, the new assistant brewer, suggested using Long Island as the blip on the radar.

When the labels were printed and applied to the bottles, John said he loved the way they came out. I thanked him for his suggestion, which he didn’t remember suggesting. Perhaps he had too many of his own beers he had been brewing that day. As much as I rely on the wise words of Notorious B.I.G., such as “never get high on your own supply”, sometimes indulging in your own beer can help come up with brilliant ideas. Thanks again, John.

We couldn’t decide if we should completely change the artwork for the new version of Abuse of Powder (changed from Mosaic Lupulin powder to Citra Lupulin powder). I received a lot of great feedback from the original, so we opted to change the color scheme instead of an entirely new design.

I went with an orange and yellow theme, trying to fit the Citra profile (floral and citrus). We had been printing my label designs on metallic decals at my day job since the Space Junk beer, and I was excited to see the difference between the original Abuse of Powder and this new version, which was night and day.

Destination Unknown has a lot of local references for their beers, and I’m glad I was able to create the label for their Gilgo Gose, which was also another collaboration with the series of beers from Local To Locals.

I used to surf Gilgo Beach when I was a kid. My dad would drive my friends and I, and the first thing I remembered about these trips was the underpass that you have to go through when you park your car. The graffiti above the tunnel that goes under Ocean Parkway always stood out to me, so I knew from the start that I wanted to incorporate this imagery into the label.

I drove down to Gilgo Beach to take a photo of the underpass, but it was about to rain that day, so I knew I’d have to edit the gray sky to be a nice blue for this perfect summertime beer. I ended up cropping out the sky entirely, and adding a blue gradient instead.

Now that I had the imagery I wanted, I needed to figure out how to make the text for the beer, and then it hit me: I could use the graffiti as the name for the beer as well. I got home with some photos to choose from, and then I spent some time making a vector version of the graffiti so that it would print crisp and clear. Another label in the books!

For the next perfect summertime beer, I made the label for Waikiki Wheat. As the label states, it’s a wheat ale with hibiscus and guava. I’m usually not a big fan of wheat beer, but the hibiscus and guava add some perfect flavors to balance out the beer. The beer is light pink in color and feels like you’re on vacation somewhere tropical.

We all agreed that a sort of Hawaiian shirt looking label would be good for this beer. While under a time restraint to get this label completed, I found and purchased a brilliant hibiscus floral pattern online. I would have loved to create my own, but since this wasn’t feasible to get the label created in time, I decided to focus my energy on the typography.

Once I found the right font to match the style of beer and theme for the label, I got to work on creating the right layout and effects for the text. I felt like something was missing from the Waikiki text with that bold solid black shadow, so I threw one of the hibiscus flowers in between the two lines of text to bring the whole artwork together.

Another last minute label (got a text on Tuesday saying they need labels designed and printed by Friday), but luckily we were on the same page about the design.

This is a collaboration with Destination Unknown and Common Roots. Both logos for each brewery are round, so it made sense to try to combine them into one. A few tweaks later, I had the right mashup for this collab.

It was recommended that I keep the background simple in spite of the time restraint, but this is my design, and that’s not how I roll. I kept it subtle with a pattern of grapes since this beer was brewed with Sauvignon Grapes. I’m definitely happy with the result after designing this under pressure.

The third installment of Abuse of Powder, and my personal favorite so far. You might have a hard time believing this is 9.3% because it isn’t boozy and it’s very smooth. New beer, same logo - just changing this one up for a green vibe. Looking forward to the next one.

I thought that the brilliant name for this beer deserved a proper label to pay homage to my favorite member of the Wu-Tang Clan. I got in a little trouble for this one. Although this was an extremely small run of cans for this beer, somehow Wu-Tang caught wind of it, and they were not happy.

Ultimately, they wanted a piece of the pie, which was a tiny pie. Dubco agreed to remove any remaining cans from the shelves. Needless to say, this label will not be produced again, which is a shame - I really liked this one.

There was a photo of Ghostface holding a slice of bread with peanut butter in one hand, and a slice with jelly in the other. I photoshopped them out to make it look like he was pouring oats for this Multi Oat Double New England IPA. This will be the last time Ghostdini will be on my labels, unless we can make it legit with them next time.

This is one of my favorites recently. The beer is awesome, and I’m happy with how the label came out, considering it needed to be designed and printed in less than a weeks notice.

I did quite a bit of photoshopping to combine images of all the fruits in this Sour Ale, and then to get the color of the new image to be reminiscent of the color of the beer. I took this back to Illustrator for the vector banner and fonts to complete this bad boy. Hopefully this beer gets brewed more often because it’s delicious.

This collaborative effort between Destination Unknown and Oyster Bay Brewing came out quite nice for this fairly new style of IPA. The name of the beer came from a Bloodhound Gang song, but I didn’t want to make an obvious reference to that, and I also didn’t want another Ghostface situation.

I decided that I wanted to keep this somewhat simple, and then I went off on a tangent of making it kind of trippy. While I look at the digital label on my computer as I’m writing this, I still get a little dizzy.

The label looks much better in person because I made sure that the logo was the metallic label showing through, so it’s not exactly black and white, and it has some shininess to it.

Originally, the full name of this beer was cleverly called Resourceful Thirsty People, but that was sort of a mouthful, so the name was abbreviated to RTP. The can release for this was the same day as In Lieu of the Innuendo, which is why I tried to keep the artwork a little more simple.

I wanted to focus more on a logo for this beer, using typography and a clean layout to be the star of this label. I purchased a great font and customized a lot of things to create this logo, and I’m definitely happy with the outcome.

Wednesdays, Am I right? This will be another series, going through different days of the week for variations on this Sour IPA. If you’ve read the other posts about labels, you’ll probably notice a theme of short-notice for design and print time. We have talked about fixing that issue for 2019, but this label kept that theme rolling.

Again, I planned for a simple design and focusing more on typography and layout, but I couldn’t decide on a background. I kept playing with ideas and I wasn’t happy. Finally, I got off the computer and went to my iPad Pro. The Procreate app was just updated, so I started playing with some new features.

I was thinking about the name of the beer, and I thought about a hectic or chaotic day when nothing goes as planned. A few colors, brushes, and distortions later, I came up with a fitting background for this tasty beer.

Mead!

A good friend of mine opened a meadery on Long Island called WA Meadwerks. They make some delicious honey wine, ranging from session meads with lactose that are around 6-7%ABV, and some stronger meads that get up to around 14%ABV like this one that clocks in at 13.1%ABV.

Named after Darryl Strawberry, this strawberry mead is semi-sweet and was finished on vanilla beans. It’s awesome. Their original idea was to have pinstripes as the background like a Mets jersey. It looked okay, but a little too simple. Then we thought about using an image of a baseball stadium, and here we are.

I’m extremely happy to work on labels for more companies, especially awesome ones for friends like WA Meadwerks. It’s also nice to stay in the alcohol business. Go check them out!

Here’s another one for the homies at WA Meadwerks. They told me their blueberry mead would be called Beauregarde Blue, in reference to Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The idea for the label was to have her blowing up like the iconic scene from the 1971 film.

I knew the image that I wanted to use, but I went back and forth debating how to execute it. I used to use a Wacom tablet in Photoshop a lot, where I’d sketch and paint from images. I’ve also done the same thing with Procreate on the iPad Pro.

I wanted to make sure that the artwork printed as best as possible, so I challenged myself to draw this image in Illustrator, making everything vector. I found a Willy Wonka type font for Beauregarde which is very fitting. I kept drawing the Blue part of the text on paper, so I took my idea of having blueberries being part of the font, and redrew this in Illustrator as well. Another sweet label in the books!