Design Challenge and Design Ideas

When it comes to non-alcoholic brands we realised a clear formula that the focus is on what’s been removed rather than the drink itself. They start as traditional beer and are stripped of their alcohol, a bit of their taste and their identity. Fierce Mild is a beer defined by addition, not subtraction. Brewed intentionally as a non-alcoholic beer, its special yeast and a trilogy of hops unlock that true beer character. This led us to our brand positioning — Fierce Mild is a brand that stands for keeping your character. As a design team our challenge was to bring this strong sense of identity and attitude to life while ensuring stand out in a highly saturated noisy category.

How the brief was fulfilled

Our task was to create a unique visual identity and packaging for this new non alcoholic beer that was rooted in the new brand positioning. We developed a robust suite of assets that allowed the brand show up in a distinctive way across packaging, merchandising, POS, social and digital. Our team worked across everything from brand strategy and naming; tone of voice and messaging; logo and brand mark; to illustration and pack design, all done under the one roof and on a shoestring budget.

Our team developed a fun tone of voice that felt human, accessible and straight talking. Working with an existing font as a base, we meticulosity hand painted a unique logo mark that felt gritty yet passionately crafted— just like the product itself. With a positioning all about character, we jumped at the chance to craft a brand mascot to embody the juxtaposition of the Fierce Mild ideal and act as a strong visual cue reinforcing brand recognition. Part cuddly, part spiky, and blowing a flame with an expression that made one feel just a little uncomfortable, this character was our touch of madness that felt distinctly Fierce Mild.

We created a can and bottle design with a reductive approach— a minimalist colour palette with plenty of clean negative space reinforcing the idea of good-tasting and natural liquid inside, while going against the heavily illustrated approach that was leading the charge in the ‘craft’ category. We chose a nostalgic brown glass with a distinctive shape for our bottle, finishing with a black metal cap where we applied a one-colour print of our flame for added detail, building another strong asset for the brand.

Against the brown glass we choose a textured polypropylene substrate for our label, helping to create a stark contrast on shelf. We applied a clear spot varnish to our logo and character adding tactility to the pack, a sense of a premiumness without feeling too exclusive or haughty-taughty. We created two bespoke labels to work across both bottle and can design, ensuring they felt absolutely consistent and drove brand recognition and awareness.