Taste and Harrogate Beer Week
A playful identity helping celebrate Harrogate’s independent beer scene for four years.
Project Details
Client: Harrogate Beer Week / Raucous
Sector: Arts & Culture
Services: Branding, Design Support, Illustration
Year: 2021-2024
Harrogate Beer Week is a town-wide celebration of independent beer, bringing together breweries, pubs, bars, restaurants and the people behind them. We worked with founder Rachel Auty to create a bold and flexible visual identity for the first Harrogate Beer Week in 2021 and continued to develop and adapt the identity across four editions from 2021 to 2024, supporting a campaign that put the town’s growing beer scene firmly in the spotlight.
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Supporting Harrogate Beer Week from its first edition in 2021 through to 2024
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Events delivered across 13 venues during one seven-day programme
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Direct spend generated in Harrogate during the 2022 Beer Week, with more than 1,000 attendees
Building a brand that could belong to a whole town
Harrogate Beer Week isn’t a traditional beer festival in a single venue. It’s spread across the town, with independent pubs, bars, breweries, bottle shops, restaurants and other businesses creating their own events as part of one shared programme.
That meant the identity needed to hold everything together without becoming too rigid.
We developed a bold illustrative system built around hand-drawn food and drink objects, characters and playful graphic elements. Paired with chunky typography and a distinctive colour palette, it gave the festival an instantly recognisable personality while providing enough flexibility to create something different for each year’s campaign.
The handmade quality of the illustrations deliberately reflected the independent businesses, breweries and DIY culture at the heart of the event.
One identity, dozens of independent events and businesses, and a whole town to bring together.
Four years of an identity designed to change
Rather than redesigning Harrogate Beer Week every year, we created a visual language that could evolve with it.
The illustration system gave us a growing library of elements that could be rearranged, combined and expanded across each edition. New graphics could be produced quickly while remaining unmistakably part of the same identity.
Across four years we applied the brand to campaign graphics, event programmes, posters, social media and promotional materials, allowing each Beer Week to have its own character without losing the recognition built up from previous years.
The result was a campaign identity that became increasingly familiar as the event itself became established.
Supporting Harrogate’s independent beer scene
The first Harrogate Beer Week launched in 2021 with 37 events taking place over seven days across 13 venues, showcasing five local breweries alongside visiting beer writers, journalists and sommeliers.
By 2022, more than 1,000 people attended events across the week, generating an estimated £20,000 in direct spend for the town.
The event continued into 2023 and 2024, bringing together pubs, breweries, artists, musicians, cafés and restaurants and helping promote Harrogate as a destination for independent beer.
For us, it’s a great example of how a relatively simple brand system can have a long life. Rather than creating something that needed reinventing every year, we built an identity flexible enough to grow alongside the event and the community behind it.
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