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Success Stories / 007_ Specimen — Mandrillus sphinx

weissmuller

Weissmuller doesn’t make polite beer, so we weren’t about to give them a polite label. We didn’t invent a mascot for this one — we found it already living on the animal the beer is named after, wearing almost exactly the pattern we’d have drawn ourselves.

ClientWeissmuller Brewing
ProductMandrill — Black IPA
ScopeNaming, illustration, label & packaging system
OutputBottle label, cap, case & POS artwork
Nº 1

The brief

Weissmuller actually does what most craft breweries only claim to — small batches, one flagship beer, nothing seasonal to hide behind. It has to earn its spot on the shelf every single time, no rotating excuses.

The Black IPA already had its name by the time it reached us: Mandrill, because someone on the brew team said the first sip felt like getting punched by something wild and weirdly well-dressed. The brief was one sentence, and it turned out to be enough:

“Make the label as feral as the beer.”

Nº 2

Six moves,
one sheet

We didn’t invent this mark, we found it on the animal’s face. Earning the right to paint it took six small drawings and one attempt we had to throw out.

First time we painted it by hand, one stripe didn’t land — you can see exactly where in PL.01, circled in red. So we went back to the actual animal, then rebuilt the pattern properly: reduce it to the shape that matters, write the rules for how the stripes are allowed to grow, and test the line in vector before trusting it in paint again. The plates below are shown at the size we actually worked at, postcard-sized — nothing here was meant to be blown up this big until now.

First hand-painted pass at the mandrill mark: cobalt and black chevron stripes with a red circle marking a shoulder stripe that breaks the pattern's flow
PL.01First pass
Painted by hand first. The circle is where it broke — one stripe doesn’t finish where your eye wants it to. That’s the moment we put the brush down.
Reference study: two photographs of a real mandrill's face, annotated with a red triangular line tracing the geometric ridge structure of the brow and nasal groove
PL.02Reference
So we went back to an actual mandrill. Two photos, one red line tracing the ridge structure we’d been guessing at — turns out it was already there.
Reduction study: a flat grey silhouette of the mandrill's face reduced to its essential V-shaped structure, with red angle guides marking the construction lines
PL.03Reduction
Stripped down to the shape that can’t change: the ridge, the groove, two guide angles. Everything else was still up for grabs.
Construction study: the reduced mandrill silhouette overlaid with a diagonal red hatch pattern defining the construction zone and growth direction for the stripe field
PL.04Field rules
The hatch is the actual rulebook — angle, density, direction. Every stripe answers to this before it answers to anything else.
Line test: the mandrill silhouette with cyan hand-inked chevron stripe pattern tested on one half against the red construction hatch on the other
PL.05Line test
First vector pass, drawn in cyan so we could tell it apart from the construction lines underneath. Redrawn more times than we’d like to admit.
Two-tone lock: refined mandrill mark with solid black on one half and cyan hand-inked stripe field on the other, orange nose and single eye placed
PL.06Locked
Where it landed — solid black against the full stripe field, nose and eye placed last. No stray endpoints this time.

Fig. 01–06Six plates, shown at the size we actually drew them

Nº 3

The mark

Cobalt and near-black, a nose like a struck match, eyes ringed in gold. Keep scrolling — the sheet takes its ink.

Every stripe here made it through the construction grid, the line test, and a last correction pass before it went anywhere near a bottle. It has to read from across a bar and it has to read printed the size of a stamp on a cap — most “wild” branding never gets checked at that second size, and it shows.

The finished Mandrill mark: a hand-painted mandrill face in bold cobalt blue and black chevron stripes, with a burnt orange nose and gold-ringed eyes

Fig. 07The finished mark — painted by hand, revealed by scroll

The back label, translated

Strong. Hoppy. Black as a guilty conscience — the kind that tears through you the way its namesake tears through a zebra.

// the brewery’s own copy, printed in Serbian on every bottle — see Fig. 08

Nº 4

On the shelf

The wordmark is the one polite thing on the label — a warm, lowercase slab serif sitting above all that ink like a brass nameplate on a door.

Below that it reads more like a spec sheet than a label — category, volume, ABV, a boxed paragraph that might as well be a warning. The mark itself only shows up as a cropped strip at the bottom: eyes and nose, just enough to recognize from across a bar, cut off before it starts competing with the type above it.

Triptych of production Weissmuller Mandrill bottles: three 500ml bottles dressed in condensation, photographed against raw concrete, a steel grate and an exposed steel pipe, each wearing the full label with wordmark, stat pair and the cropped mark band
Weissmuller Mandrill bottle photographed against raw concrete, dressed in condensation, lit from the left Weissmuller Mandrill bottle centered on a steel grate, full label visible: wordmark, category tag, volume and ABV, body copy, and the cropped mark Weissmuller Mandrill bottle against concrete with an exposed steel pipe, condensation beading down the glass

Fig. 08Production bottles — concrete and steel, not a studio softbox

TypographyA lowercase slab serif, warmer than the illustration on purpose. Keeps the label from reading as pure aggression.
Info hierarchyCategory first, then volume & ABV as a stat pair, then the copy — built to be scanned before it’s read.
Production500ml glass, painted cap, single-color press. It had to survive a short run and a small budget, so nothing fancy got in.

Some labels whisper.
This one doesn’t blink.

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