Horse’s Tale Distilling Co. was a challenging yet really fun identity to capture visually.
There were a lot of misleading paths we could have taken given the ambiguity of the name… This isn’t a horse’s tail, it’s a horse’s tale. A tale? What tale could a horse tell you? It’s not a Horse that gallops tale, it’s the tale of Adam Horsley… Ahhhh! so Horse is Adam’s nickname based off of his surname. Got it! Well who is Adam (AKA Horse) anyway and how do we make consumers connect with this guy I’ve never heard of?
This is where I had to really put the thinking cap on. If Adam was a celebrity of sorts, the consumers wouldn’t need educating and we could have just used his face somewhere on the bottle and people would have made the connection to the name, but of course, with the exception of those that know Adam, the rest of the population would be confused.
So for this reason I decided to lean in to the horse (that gallops) but humanise it by making it a half horse, half man (Adam). This would then connect the name to a character and not solely an animal. The rest is easy story telling from there.
Anyway, this presentation shows you all the visual assets, the logo suite, the illustrations and of course bringing it all together to form a beautiful label design. Photos of the finished product are not far off and I will update this presentation as soon as I have them.
Everything you see on these bottles was 100% hand drawn. There are no fonts used here, it’s all custom lettering to compliment the custom craft aspect of the craft distilling industry.
Cheers!
