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DEPT Dublin · Lacada Brewery · 2021

We had five weeks to make something memorable.

So we made our own beer.

The brief · The DEPT Delighter

“Create something memorable, be it silly or cool. Share it with the whole DEPT organisation.”

What's the budget?
Modest?
What's the deadline?
Starts now, ends 30 September.
What's too far?
Irreverent is fine. Keep it fun.
What do we win?
It's a mystery. No, seriously.

Taking part was optional. I put my hand up for Dublin, and set one rule:

This is not work. This is organised messing.

We started with absolutely nothing.

Workshop board with ideas, mood board and the brief

Convergence

90 minutes later, we had something worth making.

I grouped everything into themes: Performance, Pranks, Branding Stunts, Dimi Pranks, Sponsorship, Tech. Then everybody voted. No favourites, no committee.

Blank board to decision: 1 hour 30 minutes of workshop time.

Workshop board: the winning idea, mood board, theme groups and the vote column
Delivery loads of free beer to the Manchester office. But get a brewery to fill all the cans with water instead of beer.
Daniel
Some kind of special edition Guinness/label and send to all DEPT offices.
Mairead

The winner

“Delivery loads of free beer to the Manchester office.”

“Some kind of special edition Guinness/label and send to all Dept offices.”

Put them together: make our own beer.

Making it real

Twelve points to Ireland

From here the design was mine. The notebook went straight for everything Irish: Dublin, Eurovision, Celtic, “12 Points”. Somewhere in there it got a name: Dublin Calling.

Editing the idea

Most of it had to go

The early work had everything in it: Irish telly idents, a psychedelic horse, a lot of green. I kept cutting. The Eurovision joke survived in the name, Dublin Calling · 12 Points Pale Ale. The horse sadly did not survive. The rest became DEPT's black and its slash that works so well when repeated over stacked cans.

Telefís Éireann and RTÉ idents used as reference
01 Irish telly
Green can explorations with diagonal stripes
02 Greener
The psychedelic horse
03 Louder
Three black cans with a white slash and the horse
04 Calmer
Final Dublin Calling 12 Points can render
05 Final

From pixels to product

Designing for a canning line

Ross helped unlock the brewery. Lacada, a community-owned co-op in Portrush, brewed and canned it. I got the artwork print-ready. Real quantities, real deadlines, and none of the forgiveness of a Figma prototype.

Then we had to get 1,584 cans to Amsterdam.

The beer was in Dublin. The Weekender was not.

Stacked cans and boxes ready to ship
Ross's surf van being loaded

Ross had a surf van.

So that became the distribution network.

Boxes of cans loaded in the van
loaded up
Cans lined up on the DEPT sign
Quality check
The van parked outside an office in Manchester
Stop off
Boarding the ferry at night in Dover
Dover, boarding
Four cans in the DEPT Rotterdam office
Rotterdam office
ferryferryBelfastDublinHolyheadManchesterDoverCalaisRotterdamAmsterdamDEPT Weekender

Road trip

1,584 cans. One surf van. Two ferries.

Amsterdam, your fridge is full.

Fridge in Amsterdam full of Dublin Calling cans
Four Dublin Calling cans in the DEPT Amsterdam office
Main stage at the DEPT Weekender
Crowd under string lights at the DEPT Weekender

Outcome · DEPT Delighter winner

The beer made it. We won.

“Only the Irish would bring beer to a fully catered event.”

Dimi at the DEPT Weekender, Amsterdam

Thank you.

← Back to all work
Crowd at the DEPT Weekender under blue lights