Label Driven

A good beer label is like a familiar face or an intriguing stranger you spot across the room.

There's something trustworthy about that old bicycle on New Belgium brews and anyone could tell Four Lokos were up to no good with those rainbow camouflage designs. Beer labels can illustrate the type of debauched journey on which a drinker will embark. And the artists of said labels tend to see their job as just that – as storytellers.

Ron Hansen, the president of a Washington-based branding company, works with all kinds of beverages and food products but said that branding beer stands apart from almost everything else he does mostly because men are the major consumers of the beer in the industry – a market that included nearly 200 million cans, bottles and kegs of beer in 2010, according to information collected by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau [TTB].

"Men buy and choose products a lot different than women," Hansen said. "Beer labels and brands have to tell an interesting story."

A good label, Hansen said, will have a story that's memorable and that a customer can recall before buying, which includes colors and graphics but also a fetching name and, when done right, a beer label with a story that can emotionally affect a consumer, like a mini-movie, he said.

For Michal Mason, the artist for Chandler's SanTan Brewery, the first thing she considers when designing a new logo is the tap handle, which means starting with a circle. Other facets include the taste of the beer, the name of the brew and her personal artistic flare – which has a simplistic, retro throwback feel.

Before joining SanTan, Mason had limited experience with label design and started her career with a 30-day trial version of Adobe Illustrator. In just over a year, she has made the transition with SanTan from the sticker-style bottle labels to canned beers – a more time-consuming process that leaves little room for error.

"The can itself ends up being, fully, a huge piece of artwork," Mason said. "It's not just a tiny little square that you have to fill; you have to think about how everything interacts as a whole ... [Bottle labels] can be more creative; they can have amazing pictures with a ton of different colors. Where with a can, when you go to print, you're limited to only six colors."

Despite the limitations of canned beer art, Mason said can art is worth it because it stays intact whereas a bottle label is easily and likely peeled off.

When compiling a label, the designer and distributor have to get government approval of their artwork before anything can be produced – a process that Mason said takes about four months. After gaining approval, the designs at SanTan are sent to local printing company Rexam.

The final product is about balancing what the product is and playing up the name of the brew, Mason said, describing the colorful art on a beer can as a "foot in the door" to the customer's business.

"I tend to always be driven toward artistic labels," she said. "I tend to be label driven when I purchase things, and I think the majority of our society is label driven."