Turn Your Frown Upside Down With Spadetown Brewing Co.

Spadetown Brewing Company's beer cans highlight a fearless, character-filled typography-heavy design with a minimalist color palette. The entire design exists to symbolize a juxtaposition of lighthearted darkness. Designed by Slater, the cans make an immediate impact.

“Face as long as a Lurgan spade on ye!” Meaning: To look miserable. To have a big moany head on you. To have a face like a smacked arse. Origins: A longstanding jibe from our client’s hometown of Lurgan Co.Armagh (in Northern Ireland), this commonly used expression’s origin relates to the plight of the over-worked and under-paid workmen who painstakingly dug what is now the Lurgan Park lake.

To pay homage to the name’s origins, you couldn’t ignore the simply… ‘Irish’ tendency to love a bloody good moan and a good slagging… who doesn’t love a bit of misery? The brand brings a Lurganite in-joke to the wider public…in can form! Visually, the brand plays on the concept of ‘long faces made short’ through stretching and shrinking typography, a series of sad-faced iconographic illustrations that mimic the shape of a Lurgan spade (and their 1/2 bap glass), with supporting flexible ‘identikit’ style imagery of the variety of mopey ‘bakes’ of Lurgan. Product names and copywriting celebrate the miserable with a Northern Irish twang. A bold, personality-filled typographic pack layout and a minimalist contrasting palette representing a lighthearted darkness was used to create standout on shelf.

Parful Brews Crafted by Spade-Faced Lurganites: We were engaged by the team at Spadetown to create an identity for Lurgan’s first craft brewery. With a name like Spadetown, and after a few meetings with the team over a pint and a Fifteen, it was easy to see that the sense of humour embedded in the Lurgan psyche was something we wanted to hero.