The art direction draws from DIY, crafty visuals reminiscent of woodcut illustrations, aligning with the Americana retro badge aesthetic. A limited color palette and expressive, figurative characteristics of a linocut style—with bold crosshatching and stylized texture—allow color to take center stage.
For rapid prototyping, generative AI proved invaluable. Crafting a fully detailed linocut-style illustration by hand can be resource-intensive, especially during early concept validation. Using Midjourney, I leveraged model 4 for its strength in capturing illustrative styles. This version offered a balance of expressiveness and texture before the tool’s focus shifted toward realism and manga aesthetics in later versions.
In order to spice things up, I fed the image back via Discord in Midjourney with a describe-prompt. What this does is MJ outputs text-based descriptions of the image. For example: A professional product photograph of an old-fashioned beer can with the words “East West Beer” and “Workhouse American Pale Ale”. The background is a wood shop. Use warm colors and warm lighting. Product photography.
By doing this, the design gets the sort of fresh-eyes treatment. New ideas pop-ups and the creative mind gets an injection: conceptual, but also very practical. AI added a craftmans wooden plain project, pushing the concept deeper into the pre-powertool DIY age which is a very interesting concept to build furher on. But also quick tricks like embossing on the can, or using an orange-black colorscheme, adding more out of focus items on the foreground, etc can be all beneificial details to add more swing to the design.
[post in progress]
