BC Brewery Logos
When designing a logo for a brewery, it’s important to have a good understanding of the market that the brewery operates in / is about to launch into. We recently went looking for a list of all of the logos of all of the breweries in BC and couldn’t find one. So we made our own. All of the BC brewery logos in one place. (225 of them, as of Oct. 3, 2019.)
This is intended as a resource for any brewery in BC that’s redesigning their logo, or any new brewery that’s about to enter into the market. We often say that branding (and packaging design) NEEDS to be considered in the context in which it will be required to perform. So here’s that context for BC.
The best way we could come up with to display all of these logos is an interactive, filterable list. Each brewery’s logo is tagged with the categories that it fits into. Click any of the category buttons to filter the list.
**Note: this list doesn’t work very well on smaller screens. It’s just too much visual information. Give it a try on your laptop or tablet if you find the mobile version frustrating.
Categories:
Just like in our blog post on How To Name Your Brewery, part of the reason we’ve compiled all of the brewery logos into one place is so that we can look for patterns.
With the filter buttons on this BIG LIST it’s fairly easy to see where the white space is when it comes to BC Brewery logo designs. That’s not to say that you should aim for ALL of that whitespace. Going after certain categories that don’t have many entrants could be beneficial. Negative Space or Monograms… lots of opportunity in both of those categories. Other categories are empty for a reason (i.e. Tall & Narrow logos can be really challenging to work with.)
But you should definitely pay attention to which categories have the most entrants when considering a new logo design. Roughly 25% of the breweries in BC have a circular logo. Do we really need another one?
If you’re considering using a large single letter as the basis of your logo, it would be helpful to know about the 10 other breweries in BC already using the same approach. There are already two large “B” logos… going that route will NOT help you stand out.
We’ve identified some patterns in this set of brewery logo designs. 20% of the breweries included images of beer ingredients in their logos. 15% have included their location as part of their logo design. (This includes only the ones that have added it in, when it’s not already part of their brewery’s name.) And 13% of the breweries in BC have opted for a wordmark (a text-only logo).
Some definitions, if needed…
Handwritten: logos that look truly handwritten, as opposed to just using a cursive typeface
Monograms: definition, visual examples
Negative Space: definition, visual examples
Hardcore (“Hipster”) X logos: definition, visual examples
there have been a few BC breweries that launched in the 2000-teens with this approach but have since redesigned their logos
Place Name: breweries that added their location to their logo
does not include those that are named after their location, like Coal Harbour, Cumberland, Fernie, etc.)
Ingredients: breweries that included beer ingredients in their logo design
(PS. It’s entirely possible that we’ve missed a few breweries or included some that are no longer operational. Please let us know if you spot any errors or omissions.)
You can download an image here that includes all of the logos in one grid.
If you’re in need of a logo for your new brewery, or looking to redesign your existing brewery logo, please get in touch. We’ve designed a fair number of the brewery logos in BC, as well as logos for breweries in other markets.