Inga Ziemele and Harry Bennett’s identity for Exale brings playful charm to the craft beer scene

Multi-award-winning brewery Exale, founded in Walthamstow, London, is home to the wild, weird and wonderful. Working with the Exale team, illustrator Inga Ziemele teamed up with designer Harry Bennett to devise a new look for the brewery that would take their brand to the next level. “But similar to Pokémon evolution,” Ziemele tells us, “we needed to keep some familiarity with their past form.” To achieve this, the pair kept the brand’s original ‘lozenge-like’ shape but introduced a new typographic direction to echo the personality and hand-crafted feel of the brewery. This includes Dinamo’s sturdy grotesk ROM and the wonderfully weird and squiggly PicNic from Velvetyne, designed by Marielle Nils.

“I set a sub-brief for illustrations that asked the question of ‘when would you drink this beer?’” she tells us. And based on the beer, its unique story, the tasting notes, and the bespoke Exale-curated Spotify playlist, Ziemele then developed hypothetical scenes and associated colour schemes. “For example,” she continues, “rainy camping day while fighting off midges – Krankie; low-key garden party where your m8 blasts some old-school hip-hop on his boombox – Oona; techno rave straight after your serious job in finance – Zorc!; and so on.”

The labels themselves also embody the playful energy of the brewery, with a selection of cloud shapes. “Due to the craft beer scene being so over-crowded with quirky, loud designs, we wanted to create something that stood out from standard labels and used the real estate of the cans differently,” Bennett explains, reflecting on the decision. “Moreover, due to the personality and individuality of Inga’s amazing illustrations, we thought it only made sense for the labels themselves to be equally distinctive, as such, each beer’s cloud label is completely different to the last. Also, just a bit of fun isn’t it!”

Looking back at the project’s development, Bennett notes that finding a balance – between play and practicality – that everyone was happy with, was a challenge. “All the elements were there and I knew we could trust them – the typefaces are absolutely dynamite and Inga’s illustrations are so wonderful and unique – but bringing them together in a way we really liked AND was very legible was more difficult than we thought,” he says. “In the end, however, it definitely turned out for the best, and we’re so excited to see it evolve over the coming years!”

Inga Ziemele

Harry Bennett

Exale