Coast go full circle, turning NFT cans into reality for digital and physical brewery WAGMI Beer

Meaning ‘We’re All Gonna Make It,’ WAGMI Beer Lab have gone full circle, offering physical, custom versions of their beer can NFTs. In need of a brand and design approach to embody their idea, WAGMI partnered with Brussels-based agency Coast, creating a flexible system and vintage video game-inspired visual language that appears on the handcrafted Belgian beers, as well as their digital counterparts. 

Shaped as a single digital-physical experience, the building blocks system created by Coast unconventionally merges the traditional parameters of a beer can with the virtual variety of NFTs. The modular system itself takes the form of WAGMI’s signature ‘W’ logomark, which is able to produce over 1,500 unique patterns. “They are in the process of being generativity made,” Partner & Creative Director Frédéric Vanhorenbeke tells us, “although the launch concept has slightly shifted,” he caveats, explaining that the NFT delay has not halted the brewing stage. “The beer product is live and drinkable, but you cannot buy an NFT online yet.”

The graphic language surrounding the variable structure has a critical awareness of its place in the history of virtual products, referring to the video games that preceded it through the use of Maki Yamazaki’s Digilove eight-bit typeface alongside a bespoke logomark created by Coast. Used in contrasting macro and micro applications of text, the combination of the two seems familiar and somewhat nostalgic, playing into the brand’s emotional resonance with digital natives and gamers, from Tetris and Space Invaders to Minecraft and Roblox. 

WAGMI’s awareness of the past and push to potential futures is most overtly embodied in the relationship Coast’s use of type and modular systems have with colour, featuring an eclectic mix of vivid RGB tones and more muted metallic textures. “It’s Metaverse saturation,” Vanhorenbeke simply concludes, recalling the thinking behind WAGMI’s colour palette.

Coast

WAGMI Beer Lab