The Barrelman
A small town bar with great food, great beers, and a lot of charm. The Barrelman and the owner Ben Newman have been a wonderful addition to the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts since they opened their doors nearly a decade ago.
For this project I was asked to create a few simple and clean designs for this summers round of merchandise for the bar. Instead of last summers run of merch which didn’t deviate much from the original logo, I was given an opportunity to try out some fun concepts, as I was requested to design an old school surfer van graphic for the back.
To start off I began testing out different typeface iterations and communicating with the owner to try and land on what he was envisioning. His initial idea was the font at the top right but after I showed him what other examples looked like he changed his mind.
Next I started drafting versions of the surfer van, I found a silhouette that fit the vision perfectly and began to apply different changes to it to see what he thought fit the best. His main wish was that we could incorporate a barrel in the graphic so it had more relation to the bar and could be easily identifiable.
The final version that we settled with was a straightforward design, the bars name on the front with the town underneath in a bold sans-serif typeface, accompanied with the van illustration on the back. The client didn’t want too much noise in either graphic, and having the subtle nod to the name by placing a barrel in the back of the van was mutually agreed upon.