I was recently contracted in January 2019 by Elemental Inc. to work on some of their Campari projects. One of the asks was to design two patches and a pin for Baron Samedi Spiced Rum. The patches and pins will be given out in liquor stores to help drive awareness around the brand. In the brief I was asked to provide five concepts for the patches and three concepts for the pin. They wanted something with sculls, a tagline and their name. However, I was not allowed to use the Baron Samedi logo itself or the character.
I started off by researching the Baron brand. From there I thumbed through skull and tattoo books, searched online, I was collecting inspiration for the style I wanted to portray. I began with patch concepts. I provided about 20 sketches, but in the end we narrowed it down to six to show to the client.
Baron ended up choosing three patches instead of only two to move forward into the design phase. It ended up being short lived, though. The hand patch did not make it past the second round. RIP.
This patch was Baron’s favourite. The bottle and skull treatment inside of a casket was well received. One of the only changes was to swap out the tagline “Too Rare to Die” for “FearLess”.
When providing colour options, I took the time to add in more details, as well as customize the scull to better suit the Baron brand.
In this concept I was trying to play up the moon with the silhouette of the skull in the foreground. This went over well, with the exception that Baron is not a fan of yellow.
But that’s cool because red looks great and is one of their brand colours. Similar to the FearLess patch, I provided colour options and reworked the skull to give it more of an edge.
As with the patches, I started off by providing around 20 sketches for the pin design, which we narrowed down to four before putting them in front of the client.
Baron Samedi quite often uses snakes in their videos, and reptiles in general on their bottle’s label. They were quite happy to see a snake intertwined in a skull. At this point I am still unaware of their dislike for yellow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Again, I provided colour options and updated the skull, making sure colours and graphics aligned across all the creative.
And voilà, a complete set, Baron approved.