Jack O’Bastard, Phantom Ale

The Bastards Brewery is a truly different brand. Their way-to-do and personality are an explosive combination that always results in a powerful visual communication, as their manifest describes: “We are bastards, we go against the flow. free-thinking: be what you want to be, do what you want to do …”

With that background, SoWhat Agency and Bastards decided to launch an unusual beer for Halloween, a “Phantom Ale” called Jack O’Bastard. The beer was, in fact, a real ghost beer: The consumer bought and didn’t receive anything, actually, received an empty glass. The truth is that Jack O’Bastard have been part of a fundraising action for Solidaripatas, an organisation that takes care of abandoned dogs, the mascots of the brewery.

The visual identity, assets and the logo were inspired by classic horror films posters and Halloween costumes of the 1920s. The typography had a fundamental part of the “noir-weird-style” that we wanted to achieve, so the whole project was built through a combination of two extremely different fonts: Integral CF and Chomsky. We tried to play among normal sense of legibility and typography hierarchy, so as the base for logotype, the complementary “wave-style” compositions and some badges we used Integral CF and the majority of texts, display texts and additional information were composed using Chomsky, blackletter-style typography. And yes, we absolutely made it difficult to read the materials to keep the fun going, after all, was Halloween. :-)

Art direction by Thiago Benato. Designed by Thiago Benato and Jordy Kuster at SoWhat.