If a bar napkin had a baby with Google Calendar: FCKLCK decode their brand for Weekend Drinks

When the Belgian brand ‘Dorst’ wanted to shift its business into a new space, they realised they needed a few things. Previously, the brand functioned in solely B2B space, offering high-quality pre-batched cocktail-on-tap solutions sold directly to bars or events; but as it expanded into a D2C space with read-to-serve drinks, it reached out to Amsterdam and Belgium-based design studio FCKLCK for a complete brand refresh. The team at FCKLCK came in all guns blazing – to start off, they renamed the brand to ‘Weekend Drinks’ to underpin its personality, and highlight the effortlessness of its grab-and-go drinks, sipping on which seems as delightful as slipping into the weekend.

The idea of weekdays vs weekends fits like a charm for the visual direction as well. “Weekdays = mundane, structured and rigid. Weekend = easy-going, carefree, effortless,” says Co-founder & Creative Director James Kruger, offering some context about the inspiration for the visual direction. To echo this tension between ‘structured vs effortless,’ the team pulled visual cues from the language of “planners, calendars and notebooks (all those mundane weekly things),” Kruger adds, landing on a rigid system of lines and copy.

The utilitarian feel of this treatment is amplified by the use of OC Highway VAR 6 by Otherwhere Collective as the hero typeface. “We selected the typeface after a lengthy process of testing a variety of fonts that felt like they could be found on a typical piece of structural stationery,” Kruger tells us. “We also wanted to use the same typeface throughout our design system, therefore to make some distinction between the informative type and the wordmark, we made some adaptations to the ‘K.’” FCKLCK even generated a blink-and-you-miss-it logo animation that quickly shuffles through the brand name set in many typefaces, all of which were prior logo tests. “We felt it was a nice way to also showcase the options that didn’t make the cut,” he adds.

To soften the stern, gridded graphic system, the studio introduced a custom handwritten typeface, Weekend By Hand. “We wanted the custom font to feel as natural and spontaneous as possible. We were thinking of doodles in a notebook while you daydream about the weekend, or a sexy note written on a bar napkin, or funny sayings written on coasters,” shares Kruger. “We tested several existing handwritten-style fonts but they all lacked a natural feeling, so in the end, I just picked up a fine liner and started writing out ‘The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog’ in both caps and lowercase, with enough glyphs to cover English, French and Dutch. I must have written it over 100 times to achieve a beautiful variety.”

Layered over the tabular layout with structured lines of text, the custom typeface adds a bit of let-your-hair-down energy to Weekend Drinks, balancing the overall tone of the brand and its visual system. “The great thing about using such a straightforward graphic system is that it’s scalable and adaptable to almost any medium and size, and to juice things up we added a wide array of colours – some sourced from the drinks, along with some contrasting colours to bring in some brightness.” Pulling together all the elements in a great dance, FCKLCK delivered a brand that’s fuelled by the idea of opposites. “Imagine a bar napkin had a baby with Google Calendar and you’re in the right zone,” says Kruger.

FCKLCK

Weekend Drinks