The New Jack Arises
Joe Bird
I suspect if you are hear reading this blog then you may have noticed that we’ve had a little change up around here at Blackjack over the last few months.
In June, we released a full, new re-branding of Blackjack’s visual identity, designed and developed for us by Ensemble – a studio based in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
How do you start to completely rebrand a brewery which has had such a consistent identity for over a decade? Developing the brief was as interesting as the solution. Pragmatically speaking, we produce over 42 unique beers a year at Blackjack, so we realised early on that we needed a streamlined system of producing can and pumpclip designs that had a coherent language.
Ensemble began the project by addressing what matters most in this industry; the community around us. Using a survey that was sent out to the whole spectrum of people that engage with Blackjack; from pubs and shops that buy our beers, other local breweries, businesses to direct customers in our bars and friends of the business.
What came back taught us a lot about ourselves and helped us focus in on the existing aspect of Blackjack we wanted to celebrate – our pubs with their regulars and communities and specific sections from our product range. It also taught us about the new directions we could travel in with a new identity.
Ensemble took our logo – almost completely unchanged in the brewery’s previous 12 years and delved into the history of the character. They uncovered its origins in the Knave of Coins, a reoccurring character and motif of a trickster throughout myth and folklore. The new logo references something of the old logo but the character is reworked into something clean and structured, as well as practical in terms of its formatting and usage on our printed and digital media.
Developing on the idea of the Jack as a character, Ensemble began to develop a narrative you can find across the brand as a travelling entity that seems intrinsically linked to the delivery and service of Blackjack’s beers. Martin James Power of Ensemble tells us “The previous incarnation was much loved by their existing local customers but was less known amongst the stacked bottle room fridges. This, paired with the desire to move away from any association with casinos or gambling, gave us room to reestablish and celebrate the Jack, from the face card, to a pivotal character of folklore, who brought to life the stories that we share when sat with a beer”
How do you provide texture and personality to tales of the Jack and Blackjack’s beers? With a custom typeface, of course. Ensemble literally took to the streets, researching the historic signage, building fronts and engravings of the area. Referencing the unique quirks, styling and signatures of the lettering in the area surrounding the brewery, they developed Blackjack Meadows; a sans-serif display typeface that is now used to communicate, elaborate and explain all the information you might need across Blackjacks visual language.
The area that provided inspiration for Ensembles work, the tale of the Jack and the typeface; our neighborhood. A historic and fascinating part of the city and could really be described as the key ingredient in Blackjacks new visual identity. Many people will be familiar with Angel Meadow’s association with Engels, who famously coined the phrase Hell upon earth describing the area.
“Our location in Manchester is dripping in rich and important history, albeit both quite dark and revolutionary.” director Jon Hartley tells me. “Working with Ensemble who helped us eke out a method to subtly convey both our own histories and the history of the area we feel privileged to call home has been quite the journey.”
The modern park of Angel Meadow & St. Michaels Flags itself is what remains of a mass public grave following a cholera outbreak that decimated the area. Sitting behind where the St Michaels church once stood with only it’s flag stones remaining, it is protected by various means from being built on top of, leaving it now a little green oasis in what is fast becoming a highly developed area, supporting an incredible range of independent, local businesses.
The history of Angel Meadow is something Blackjack can’t ignore – referenced in many of our beers such as Ragged School and Dancing Saloon; named after the Charter Street Ragged School & Working Girls Home, opened in a former dancing saloon and brothel by evangelical christians 1853, providing for those in Angel Meadow who were escaping the Potato Famine at the time.
“Blackjack had something that most other breweries of 12 years didn’t have – a heritage story, not of their beer, but of their neighbourhood.”
- Ensemble
This sense of place as part of Blackjacks narrative and identity encouraged us to think about how we view our own beers and our own products. We’d heard from the initial survey that we were recognised for the quality of our traditional styles of beers so how do we marry that up with our own increasing excitement about the quality of our beers that fall outside of that style of brewing?
With Ensemble, we looked at each of our beers as individual products and considering how, when and why they were brewed, we began to understand and recognise how each beer fits into a range – We had already begun something similar to this with our Pub Ale series; a range of beers inspired by historic, old school, unfussy cask beers historically found in British pub culture.
Building on this we developed the Angel Meadows range – the bitter, pale beers inspired by the American West Coast we as individuals began our lives and careers in the industry drinking. Next to this we developed the Future of Modern range – more conceptually definied, this is where we placed every beer that riffs of a classic style or is a developmental, learning process for us.
Alongside our constantly expanding lagers, collaborative beers and the soon to be released Hell Upon Earth and Jeune series, Ensemble developed a system of can and pumpclip design that uses additional fonts, formats and imagery that creates a cohesive language across the brand whilst maintaining variety amongst the ranges.
The final piece of the puzzle? The complete logotype – Ensemble created a wordmark that encapsulates what we’ve learnt about Blackjack and what we want to do with Blackjack going forward. Something that’s communicates the heavy, industrial past of the area with the modern brewery with operate as now.
“The opportunity for us to celebrate our heritage and the very streets we were founded on was something we loved. It not only gives us a story to tell but celebrates our very foundations in the type that story is set in”
- Rich Fowell, Blackjack
If you’re interested in hearing more from the team at Ensemble about the development of our new brand then please have a look at some of the press it’s received from these publishers: