Introducing Cloud Skater
Our client, Skate Raleigh, partnered with Trophy Brewing to create a new addition to its lineup called “Cloud Skater.” Like Skate Raleigh, Trophy Brewing’s home is in Raleigh, North Carolina. They have deep ties to the community via their fantastic brews and many locations. They also have an existing line of “Surfer” beers: Cloud Surfer, Aloha Surfer, and Summer Surfer, to name a few. Cloud Skater joined this lineup as a modern, West Coast-style IPA.
HALO 22’s task? We needed to create label art to attract attention on the shelves and expand Skate Raleigh’s reach via Trophy’s existing fan base.
Our kickoff included connecting with Trophy’s team to get templates and doing a deep dive into previous Trophy label designs to get an idea of design expectations. We looked at some previous collaborations, plus the entire Surfer line. Their Surfer label designs are clean, with bold colors and illustrations of themed surfers, as you can see below:
Our design needed to include some similarities with this line—primarily illustrations of people skating in clouds that interact with the beer name. However, we didn’t aim to mimic the style exactly. We wanted the final design to carry the theme elements in a grungier way. So, we picked a different illustration style for the skater, created a pattern of different skaters for the background*, and put it all on a wavy gradient background with Skate Raleigh brand colors.
*Our favorite background skaters are the Grim Reaper and Bulldog. See if you can spot ‘em!
To celebrate Cloud Skater’s release, Skate Raleigh hosted a Trophy Brewing beer garden at the Conlon Family Skatepark, complete with competitions and (of course) plenty of beer. See the details at SkateRaleigh.com.
Team
David Spratte, Creative Director
Emily Combs, Lead Designer
