Every year at Golding’s we’ve run an event with Garage Project as an SPCA fundraiser. A sort of tap takeover/bring your dog to the pub day. This year was a raging success and collectively we raised over $6000 for the Wellington SPCA. Absolutely Stirling.

One of the things we decided to do was rename every beer on tap with dog/animal puns. Sounds easy enough. We’ll just change the name on the menu board, and that’s sorted. Oh, and I got asked very nicely, if I could please change the tap badges to make them more ‘doggy’.

Well now, messing around in Photoshop is one of my favourite ways to waste time when I should be doing more important things at work. We had eight beers to re-brand, plus one new beer that required all new art. Whilst some came out better than others, overall I’m pretty pleased with the end results (if I do say so myself). I thought I’d share them here.

Credit to Mattie, Ian and the Garage Team for the dog puns.

Death From Above

At Golding’s we use a rectangular tap badge, quite unlike what most other bars use. So my usual technique is to take bottle labels or posters, then crop and shrink them down to size. With Garage project I’m usually pretty blessed. They frequently commision artists to create unique label art. In this case, it’s Tim Gibson of Flying Whities who made the original:

And our version…

Baltic Porter

The original is designed by ALC, and features a boxing Russian Bear.

For out version, I nicked a wolf head from another piece of ALC art and popped it on the bear’s body (because wolves are dogs, right?).

 

Mon P’tit Chou

Mon P’tit Chou means “my little cabbage”.

The original art reminds me very much of the work of a wonderful artist Stasia Burrington. So I cycled through her portfolio to find something doggy that still had the right feeling basically stole it wholesale (sorry, it was for charity).

Mon P’tit Chien means ‘my little dog’. This badge presented an interesting challenge – typefaces. Swapping the image was easy, but altering a unique lettering, that’s difficult. For expediency, I started from scratch, and went with a typeface that evoked the right feeling for me.

China White Beyond the Pale

Silhouette of a bottle? No problem. How about Silhouette of a cat? I had cats growing up, so I couldn’t resist a kitty reference somewhere in here.

Recreating the background was the hardest part of this one. In fact, I feel like this is perhaps the most slap-dash of all the badges I made. Then again, I was on a deadline and I feel I got the jist of it.

Hapi Daze

This is another Tim Gibson work. It’s pretty great. All I had to do was change the words and drop in a doggie with a frisby.

Whilst doing this one, I noticed for the first time that the chap in the lawn-chair is blazing a splif…

Hops on Pointe

This one I’ll admit to copping out on. The art simply does not crop well.

So basically I simplified the whole design, added an ‘R’ and popped in a few paw-prints.

L’il Red Rye

This was my easiest job of the lot, being the most canine-related of all the GP bottle art I was working with.

Again, text presented the biggest challenge. I don’t love the text I went with, but it was the best I could wrangle. As for the doggies, a little palette swap to make them more Retriever-y and…

Angry Peaches

This is both one of my favourite Garage Project beers, and the badge I’m proudest of/spent the most time on.

It’s also, coincidently, the badge that had the most Photoshop-trickery/bullshit go into it. Can you spot any?

My only wish is that I’d made the top dog blue. Otherwise, FUCKING NAILED IT!

Tummy Tickles Brown Ale

So we had one more beer to make a completely new piece of art for. Tummy Tickles was a one-off small-kit brew batch of a hoppy Brown Ale. So basically, one of my favourite styles of beer, ever.

I had a concept, which was fake/subversive Victoria encyclopedia illustrations. I think that there’s potential for an entire brewery brand to be based around this idea (Remedy Brewing has played with something similar).

Here was what I came up with:

I think I can safely say I nailed the look I was going for.