Designing a craft beer brand from scratch for free
When a friend bought a brewery in Durham, North Carolina, and needed labels immediately, the payment was a lot of free beer. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl walks through the quick, scrappy identity he designed for Starpoint Brewing, rooted in local pride, the colors of the Durham flag, and textures sourced from specific Durham buildings. He explains why the cans stay white so they block out color on the shelf, and why this is exactly the kind of side project a designer wants to be known for. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on side projects, Why Every Designer Needs a Side Project.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl shares a side project he finished in about a week: a brand and can labels for Starpoint Brewing, a Durham, North Carolina, brewery a friend had just bought. The beer was ready to can, there was no branding, and the only starting point was a star the owner liked.
Working quickly, Calvin defined what the brewery stands for: being truly local, the darling of Durham, and a place where paths cross. The colors come from the Durham flag, and every can carries a background texture sourced from a specific Durham location, credited on the side of the label.
He closes with a lesson in shelf strategy. Only the star changes color, so a row of white cans blocks out space on the shelf, the same brand blocking that makes a consistent illustrated series stand out.
Highlights
The project was paid in free beer and finished in a rush.
The brand is built on being truly local to Durham.
Can textures come from specific Durham buildings and locations.
All-white cans with a color-changing star create brand blocking on the shelf.
Side projects like this shape what a designer becomes known for.
Key insights
Start with what the company stands for
Even on a rush job, Calvin began by figuring out the brewery’s purpose before designing anything.
Own an attribute competitors only claim
Other breweries call themselves local without brewing in Durham. Starpoint makes locality tangible through the flag colors and location-sourced textures.
Small details reward attention
Printing the exact source of each texture on the label gives curious drinkers something to discover.
Consistency wins the shelf
Changing one element while holding everything else steady lets a product line read as a single block of color.
Detailed analysis
The clip shows that a side project doesn’t have to be polished to be valuable. Calvin is candid that the labels will probably change within a year, but the core thinking, a clear stance on locality and a disciplined system for the cans, holds up as real brand work.
It also illustrates his broader point about side projects: they let a designer pursue work they’re excited about and become known as the person who made it.
Conclusion
A quick, unpaid project for a friend became a compact lesson in positioning and packaging, and the kind of work Calvin is happy to put his name on.
Transcript
I’m going to show off some of my—actually, I’ll start with this since we’re talking beer side projects. Seriously, Ryan, thanks for sharing this too, by the way. I love it. A buddy of mine bought a brewery in Durham, North Carolina, and maybe a week ago was just like, “Hey, we have a bunch of beer that’s ready to go. We need it canned immediately, and we basically have no branding and no labels for the beer, except I like this star. I like this idea of a star.”
So, he sent me a star. His name’s Andy. Super good guy. I know him through another buddy. He’s a hardcore beer connoisseur and bought a brewery with a couple other guys in Durham, North Carolina, and it’s called Starpoint Brewing. And so in the quickest possible way, I was like, “All right, let’s figure out what you stand for as a company.” I’m doing this all the same as you, Ryan, where I was doing this all for, just, please send me a bunch of free beer. I’m not even that hardcore of a beer drinker, but if you send me a bunch of it, I’ll be happy.
So, we didn’t have a lot of background behind the brand. The name Starpoint apparently comes from a big, elaborate intersection in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the brewery originally started. So, it kind of comes from this idea of the local and location. And he told me that they really wanted to do a brewery that was truly a local brewery, where they become the darling of Durham, North Carolina. There are other breweries in Durham that hit on the “we’re a Durham brewery” thing, but it turns out a lot of them aren’t actually even brewing things directly in Durham. And so we wanted to own some of the aesthetics. The colors you’re seeing here are the colors of the Durham flag.
And the whole point behind the brand is that they just want to be the place where our paths cross. They just want to brew moments for getting the community together. They’re really community-minded. The owners also run a community brew festival where they try to bring in people who aren’t normally in the brewing industry, like people of color and things like that. So, they’ve got a really strong community mindset.
So, here’s how the cans turned out. Very simple. Just riffing off of some ideas they had and putting the star front and center. Get the logo on there. The beer types are always really simple. They’re just the name of the beer. One little fun aspect in this: you see all these textures in the background. The textures always come from a very specific building and location in Durham. And you can’t see it here, but on the side of the label, it always says the exact location where the texture was sourced from. Little touches like that.
Just a super fast, quick and dirty design project, but it turned out pretty fun. I like how this stuff looks. So, really simple. Probably going to do a lot more work for them. I feel like all these labels will probably be completely different by the time next year comes around, because this was definitely a rush project. But I love how it turned out, and from what I heard, it sounds like their head brewmaster there is pretty legendary. So, excited to try some of the beer.
So, this is the kind of side project I love to then be known for, like, all right, the designer that did Starpoint. That’s super cool. And yeah, thanks, Ryan. Yeah, [unclear] I’d grab one off the shelf. Yeah, for sure.
I think that was the thing. This is probably a whole other consumer goods design discussion someday, but the idea of brand blocking: we wanted all white cans. The only thing that’s changing color is the star, because if they’re next to each other on the shelf, we want all white cans to block out some color space on the shelf. That’s also the reason I like your Sasquatch stuff, because it has good brand blocking. The illustrations are consistent, but you always get that little band across the top.