Escarpment laboratories
The label design work I do for breweries lead Escarpment Labs to reach out to me about designing exciting and funky packaging for their yeast cultures. They have a variety of products home brewers, commercial brewers, and even some food cultures like sourdough starters. In these categories the packaging is often uninspired and very corporate looking. These are lab-made products with labels full of big scientific words. Where does art and fun fit into that? At Escarpment Laboratories, that’s where!
The first project we tackled was designing pouches for the liquid yeast cultures intended for home brewing. Escarpment already had these gorgeous icons designed to visually categorize the different yeast strains. They featured unique patterns, shapes, and colours within a small circle and meant you could quickly differentiate something like a IPA from a Pilsner at a glance. We decided to expand on these tiny icons and create these patterns that flowed throughout the pouches.
As Escarpment grows, so does their product line. Next up was some similar packaging but for food cultures. These products were released right on the tail end of the lockdown sourdough craze, so it was the perfect time to get these artisanal cultures out into the world and we needed them to look the part. We used a similar visual language as the icon-themed patterns, but instead created these illustrations loosely based on the structure of the microscopic cells within each package.
We’ve done plenty of other labels and packages, but one of my favourite Escarpment Labs projects was for a giveaway item they would send out with large orders. It was an illustrated guide to the brewing process, but if it were a theme park, and the guide was its map.
