La Ronce
Noire
A collectible 16oz craft beer can design for Forage Microbrewery — translating the sensory memory of late summer, blackberries, and fading golden light into a refined graphic system.
What Forage Asked For
Forage Microbrewery needed a flagship can design for La Ronce Noire — a Belgian-style ale fermented with a proprietary sour yeast culture and macerated with blackberries. The brief wasn't about depicting the beer's ingredients literally. It was about telling a story.
📋 The Product
A Belgian-style sour ale macerated with blackberries. Intended for boutique bottle shops — something collectible, beautiful, and quietly immersive. 16oz format.
✨ The Feeling
Memory. Late summer abundance. The tension between sweetness and bite. Cultivation versus wildness. The berries as an emotional anchor, not a product diagram.
🎨 Creative Freedom
Color, texture, type integration, and narrative approach were all left open — as long as the result felt cohesive and intentional. How illustrative or graphic was entirely my call.
📦 Deliverables
One fully realized can design (6" × 4" wrap), plus supporting visual elements: palette, motif, and a written note about the story being told through the imagery.
Finding the Story
The starting point was feeling — not the blackberry itself, but what a blackberry at the end of summer actually means. That specific moment just before sunset when golden light spreads warm across a quiet landscape and everything feels both abundant and fleeting.
Three distinct directions were explored in early sketches: a sun-drenched landscape scene, a human silhouette foraging in a field, and a bold close-up of the blackberry as graphic motif. The landscape direction won — it best captured the atmospheric tension the brief asked for.
From Sketch to System
Once the landscape direction was chosen, a digital color study brought the scene to life. The composition wraps around the can — layers of deep purple field, golden horizon, and warm orange sky converging into one atmospheric moment. The blackberry motif appears as a refined line illustration beside the logotype, grounding the design without overpowering it.
Digital Color Study
The color sketch explored how gradient transitions between purple, magenta, orange, and gold would read across the curved surface — testing the emotional temperature before committing to final execution.
- Deep purple fields as the emotional base
- Golden sun evoking warmth and late-summer memory
- Diagonal light rays cutting through the sky
- Layered cloud forms softening the composition
Color Palette
Four colors define the system — each pulled directly from the emotional landscape of late summer. Warm, saturated, and intentional.
Typography
Julius Sans One for the logotype — elegant, refined, suited to a boutique bottle shop aesthetic. The script lettering of "La Ronce Noire" adds handcrafted warmth against the geometric illustration.
The Blackberry Motif
A delicate line illustration of blackberries and leaves appears in four color variations across the brand system — functioning as an emblem that reinforces the organic, foraged quality of the beer without becoming decorative clutter.
The Brand System
The final deliverable presents the full can design alongside a brand layout — showing the illustration, palette, typography specimen, motif in four color variations, and a three-angle can mockup. Taken together they communicate the system's cohesion as a whole.
What I Took Away
🌅 Designing for Feeling, Not Function
This brief pushed me to lead with emotion rather than information. The blackberry isn't shown as an ingredient — it's felt through color, light, and atmosphere. That shift in framing changed every decision I made.
📐 The Constraint of the Can
Designing around a cylindrical surface meant thinking in three dimensions from the start. Color transitions that look flat on screen behave differently wrapped around a form — the sketch phase was essential for catching that early.
🎨 Illustration as Brand System
Building out the blackberry motif in four color variations taught me how a single illustration element becomes systematic. Recolored thoughtfully, it became the connective tissue across the whole identity.
✍️ Writing as a Design Tool
The brief required a written note about the story being told. Writing it before refining the design helped clarify decisions and gave the work a coherent point of view it might not have had otherwise.
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