Friday, June 10, 2011

Brand Newish: Golden Valley Brewery

Certainly the most local of all the rebrandings featured this week. I suspect not many people have heard of Golden Valley Brewery, but a P*S* Reader was kind enough to send them my way, and they fit nicely into this week’s theme.

Old:

New:

The old identity and label design are far from perfect, but they do utilize a degree of simplicity that conjures up a more traditional sensibility appropriate to a microbrew such as this. The GVB monogram in particular, while clumsy, carries some gravitas of establishment... the old school, if you will.

Apparently the new school involves rendering that monogram in a much more dimensional way, which I find very distracting. It draws far too much attention to the G and B being impaled by the V like a couple of vampires. Then they layered in the full name of the brewery, which creates some serious redundancy... apparently no one noticed they already had the name emblazoned across that ribbon on the lower third of the label.

And speaking of the labels, it’s remarkable to me that they have almost identical visual heirarchies, but somehow the newer one is much more muddled. Something about adding the illusion of depth, presumably in an attempt to make things “pop”, really just ends up making it harder to read, I think.



Thanks to P*S* Reader and iPhone user Kristina Franklin, for today’s pairing.

Be like Kristina! Go here to learn more about contributing to the cause. And here to get the P*S* iPhone App.

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