BAD APPLE CIDER BRANDING CONCEPT
Bad Apple just dropped a colossal apple on the city, and cider will never be the same.
In this project, I’ve reimagined what a contemporary cider brand might become when illustration and narrative lead the system. I looked at two routes, one leaning more into lettering, and the other featuring a full illustration of a chaotic, tongue-in-cheek scene wrapping the whole can.
I initially explored hand-rendered blackletter typography which I developed into a custom logotype. Vibrant colours replace the usual stale cider palettes. No sleepy orchards here. Pulling inspiration from craft beer to appeal to a younger demographic. The central apple and skull motifs were then refined into distinctive, responsive logomarks, allowing them to scale across packaging and future brand extensions.
A step closer to reality
Whilst both routes successfully challenged the visual clichés that dominate the category, I felt ‘Applecalypse’ had more scope overall, where this could be the flagship launch from Bad Apple. The humourous, chaotic scene and the name work perfectly together and could easily extend into a campaign. The other execution still had merit and I’m a fan of the negative space ‘BAD’ in the apple-core skull.
Even though this was conceptual, I wanted to take this a stage further and printed a small run of both labels. This gave me a chance to refine the colours for CMYK and test on Polypropylene. I then applied these to cans for further photography.
