Modern Brief is an Instagram account that run weekly mock brief competitions for branding and design. We decided to enter their latest brief which was for a fruit-infused sparkling water brand called Charley. They wanted something to portray the zest of real fruit flavours and the essence of natural energy in the drink. They also asked for something elegant yet dynamic design with deliverables of a logo and some minimalistic packaging.
I set out to find a typeface that I thought would encapsulate the fun side of the brand but not be too over the top while still elegant and minimal. I ended up landing on a typeface that was rounded and soft but had some personality (I loved the shape of the letter L a lot which made me choose it). I then hand-drew an icon to pair with it and landed on a wedge of lemon/lime to incorporate the zesty-ness/real-fruit aspect that they were after.
I chose colours that were a touch muted and not super bright/in your face to give that higher-end, more elegant feel while keeping it fun and playful. Next was to decide the flavours that I wanted and the extended colour palette. I love finding pleasing colour combos and having that balance between light and dark and just generally finding nice colours. I settled on pineapple, raspberry, and lime for the flavours to have the mixture of warm and cool colours while keeping them all tonally similar.
The last thing to do was put the design on some mockups and make the products come to life. I did a can first, because being a sparkling water product, this felt like the most likely product that they’d need. I decided to use the illustration I did as a background pattern, to subtly give the can a bit more texture/visual appeal. I then decided to use both light and dark colours on each side of the can to separate the logo from the rest of the information that the can needed (the tagline and the mL measurements), and of course I used a wiggly line to do this to really bring home the fun aspect of the design.
The other collateral I made was a website (because of course we were always going to mockup a website!), and some coasters. These used the same wiggly line for the coasters to create a border on them and had the text going around in a circle to make the main focal point the icon in the middle. Overall I think the branding really came together and hit the brief. The main thing though was that it was super fun and I really enjoyed having the free reign to just create whatever came to mind.
The best thing though was finding out that our design came in first place! What a wonderful way to start a Friday!
