Open Garage // Day 2 - Rapid Idea Generation

The aim of the

In day 1 we gained a really good understanding of the design problem and opportunity, hoping to brand Open Garage as having a geographical connection Cumbria, while embracing interest in craft beers amongst younger drinkers. Today, the focus was on generating as many solutions on paper as possible. We identified the main areas of focus for the day:

1-Names
2-Logo
3-Label
4-Packaging

We began the day with a 5 minute round of brainstorming names for the two beers. We had identified that it was important that the names we chose could easily be extended as the range of beers increases.
Independently we produced lists of suggestions. Many of mine focussed on farming concepts.

After marking the names we liked from each other's list, we did some research into Cumbria and Cumbrian Dialect and found some potential names that we thought could work really well. Calling Rob from Open Garage to run these names past him, we settled on:

Jinny Spinner - This means Daddy Long Legs in Cumbrian dialect.

Fodder Gang - This is a passage for feeding cattle.

Both of these terms will be recognisable to Cumbrians but do not exclude those outside the region. We felt that these both had a playfulness to them that could run through to the graphics and provide a system for naming future beers in the range.

Having decided on the names, we conducted a round of 7 minute 'crazy 8s' to sketch ideas for the Jinny Spinner label. 

While some interesting ideas were proposed, nothing jumped out at us as a definite solution. We decided to come back to this after having a round for the Fodder Gang. This was much more fruitful:

We were drawn towards options that made use of faces or facial features. Exploring this concept in a further round, we started to adopt the separate themes of insects and hiphop and looked at some key features we could extract from these themes to create faces on the bottle.

In discussions off the back of this, we came up with the concept of each face being different as, due to the flexibility provided by the short run, each of the bottles could be hand-labelled with different stickers. Developing this further, we decided to take a different approach and allow drinkers to apply these different elements themselves, adding to the character on the bottle with sticker accessories - similar to children's sticker books. This social activity could work hand-in-hand with a culture of instagraming newly found beers. Different compositions could be uploaded by drinkers and celebrated on the Open Garage website.