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Design One & Two, Design Three



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Every year, Webmaster Mike and I change up the Double Bastard Ale label a bit. I readjust the text and Mike and I decide how to readjust the front label. Ever have what you thought was a good idea go horribly awry? Well, it happened bigtime with this year's Double Bastard Ale label.... Design #1 I had the idea to print white-over-red ink and make the top gargoyle a "positive" image and make the upside-down gargoyle a "negative" image, hoping that our bottle printing company could get the registration on it good enough that it would work. I was hopeful. Mike was dubious. The result was, let's say...weak. From a distance they look fine. Up close, they are pretty blurry. Design #2 I had this brilliant idea how to fix Design #1. Just remove some of the detail lines from the gargoyles so that the interplay between the bottom red layer and the top white layer didn't conflict with each other as much. The result was a mess. Horrible. A train wreck made worse by the fact that the printers printed red-over-white instead of white-over-red. When I asked Mike if he had told them which order to print the inks he said "No, I figured they would use the same directions I gave them for the first design." #&%*! My bad idea was compounded by Mike's incorrect assumption that the printer would pay attention. Printers rarely pay attention. And THEN, to make it worse, we didn't communicate our dissatisfaction to the printer so when the next shipment of bottles came into them...they ran the same bad artwork again! What boneheads Mike and I were for that. We were concentrating on fixing the design and forgot to tell them not to run any more of the bad design. Design #3 Still (foolishly) holding onto the idea of having each of the gargoyles be a mix of two colors we simplified the idea even more. The concept for this version was again from Mike and me, but I think I should take most of the blame. The result is OK at best. Mike actually likes it more than I do. I think it lacks impact and could be a lot better. On a positive note, I finally got around to refining my vitriolic text on the back for this printing run. The updated diatribe is a little more pointed. Better sentence structure and readability --- which admittedly is a bit of a stretch to say as it's still very stream-of-conciousness-ish with several run-on sentences, but that's what vitriolic diatribes are all about! I mean, who worries about precise sentence structure when you're PISSED OFF!

-Greg