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My First Attempt At Graphic Design: Peter's Bitter Black Existence
So this is the label I designed for Peter's Bitter Black Existence. This is the first time I've ever done anything like this. We have a plethora of artists on these forums, so I want some feedback. Be honest. Be brutal. I want this to be an amazing label for an amazing beer. You can view a larger version here.
EDIT: Here is a link to the photo set, in case you missed it farther down. I'm including every major modification as a separate label. If I just adjusted the symmetry of a couple of elements, that won't be uploaded as a separate label.
Comments
I've made a set to collect all the various revisions. You can access it here.
You're right about the "Imperial Stout" and "2009," but I don't know what you mean about the sidebars.
The photo is disconnected from the rest of the label. There is no nexus between them. The photo is in grayscale, but the label is black and red. Perhaps if you changed the peripheral text to gray, instead of whatever crappy orange color it is now? You could take care of both problems that way. Also, the second cropping doesn't give you enough of the flower to get the point across. You need to go with at least as much of the photo as you have in the first label if you are going to use the photo.
The logo is off-center, and the text needs to be arched just a little more to match the arch of the oval, but other than that it's not bad. I have a few things I'd like to try tweaking with it, but I don't have time today because I have a million things to do.
EDIT: Oh yeah; I don't think Bitter and Black should be separated like that. Have you tried this?
Bitter, Black
Existence
The text overlapping the photo would be fine if you had a black border to make it pop. I could totally walk you through doing that in raster, but I don't know how to do it in vector. It's not the same thing as stroke. I guess you could try duplicating the text, turning the text on the back layer black, and off-setting it slightly.
As I said, I've made several revisions. Here's my current best effort:
I still need to balance the "Imperial Stout" and "2009," but that's pretty minor.
EDIT: Fixed some centering and balancing issues. Say hello to Revision 7:
Now the red text is disconnected. The blue attribution text looks out of place. Changing the attribution text to red might help pull it together. You need something red outside the gray box.
Don't use absolute black for the background, it stands out to much when there's a lot of it together.
Keep it to just what people want to know. If unsure, leave it out.
If you get the hang of PagePlus, it makes knocking up things like this really quick.
The photo is from here.
If you're not going to do that, and you'll just print on a deskjet or whatever, then you have to pick colors that are far more different than each other. Right now the gray is really hard to read on that black. When you print it will probably be even harder to read. Also keep in mind that if your monitor isn't IPS (you don't have UltraSharp do you?) and isn't calibrated, that the printed result will be even more different from what you see on your screen.
EDIT: I disagree about the black background. I very much want the contrast to be that extreme, and it's also called "Peter's Bitter Black Existence;" there better be lots of black on the label.
Your design is neat, but it's sort of a weird middle ground in terms of "stuff." Most beer labels are either a lot busier, or a lot more minimalist. Take Mikkeller Black as an example. Compare it to Stone's Oaked Arrogant Bastard Label. The Stone Label is even a little clean as far as beer labels go, but you can see that it's significantly busier than the Mikkeller label. I feel like your proposal falls in between the two.
EDIT: Try this one.
I like Tfu Tfu a touch more, but it's a little messier. Overall, they're about equal in my mind.
The difference between the current incarnation and the first one you posted is pretty amazing. This one looks like it could actually be put on a commercial bottle.
Maybe something like this:
"This infernal concoction froths with the hate of imprisoned yeast. You would do well to leave them behind, for their wrath is terrible and you are too weak to handle it. Consider yourself warned."
Technically, it's illegal to even give it away.
Of course, you do work very closely to the health and safety regulations, so operating an underground bottler might not be something you want to do on principle.
The first one has the whole "This infernal concoction..." on a separate label in the back
This one has the legend on it.
-People like squares and boxed stuff, so the ounce and alcohol level kinda threw it off since everything seems to follow a strict reticule except that, so as you can see, I shortened it to the abbreviations.
-I lowered the "Front Row Brew" to touch and to break the gray framed Box and to add some integration with whatever is outside the square, I also shortened the gray box as well.
-You can see that by putting the "Imperial stout" in two different lines, you avoid the balance problem, so if you just want to put in the year on the other side, now you could do it.
-I flipped the text with the description of the ingredients as I don't think that it should be part of the design of the label, its just fun info to read, so by flipping it, you break up the design into two parts but it keeps it integrated (if that makes any sense, I'm not that good at technical stuff in English.)
-I would advice against using a "serif" font on the info texts as it's harder to read in smaller sizes, you should also up the contrast a bit with a lighter shade of gray
-I also believe that some art nouveau ish swirls as separators would work well with the theme of the label (not the ones I used, those kinda suck, but again, you get the idea)
In either case, I think it's an excellent design. My gut is telling me it might be safe to blur the edges of the pictured flower, have the image itself blending and melting into the solid blackness behind it, threatening and engulfing. My stomach, on the other hand, says to drink the beer.
I would also warn against including too many different fonts in the label. A big rule of design is to not overmix fonts. 2 is pushing it; 3 is almost always too much.