BROAD LEAF

PACKAGING

Broad Leaf Brewery’s new imbibed spirit line needed an identity, something far out that matched the wild and experimental nature of the brewery.

Under heavy influence of cassette-futurism and the aesthetic of early sci-fi movies (think: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, The Thing), we thrifted an old oscilloscope to create a unique collection of graphics for the various design elements of the packaging. Oscilloscopes are used by electricians and medical staff to read and display the electrical impulses and signals that are connected. You’ve likely seen them before in hospitals and in cinema as heartbeat monitors, reading and displaying the different pulses of the person hooked up to the machine.

Electronic instruments, mainly synthesizers, create their sounds and frequency by using a raw waveforms (like sine waves, triangle waves, ramp and sawtooth waves) that are repeating at audible speeds that vibrate speakers your speakers, creating sound.

That loud bass you hear coming out of a subwoofer in a Jeep? That’s a reeeeeeeally long waveform, repeating slowly at a lower frequency. The high-pitched, glassy and shimmering synth sounds in your favorite Sylvan Esso track? That’s likely a variety of waveforms mixed together, creating unique shapes and tonal elements (and probably fed through a beautiful effects pedal).

We hooked up a modular synthesizer, which provided an endless amount of waveform routing and processing, into the oscilloscope and went full ‘mad scientist,’ creating over 50 unique graphics captured with a camera on the oscilloscope’s display.

The final label design blended the unique graphics with a few novelty fonts and included tactile typography (braille), spot gloss printing and a vibrant color palette that fits right in on the shelves at Broad Leaf and Brewery Vivant.