It’s not easy to stand out in any craft beer market, especially one as vibrant as Asheville, North Carolina. The home of Hi-Wire, Burial, and Wicked Weed has a population of less than 100,000, but more than two dozen breweries. When Archetype Brewing entered the scene in 2016 the team—led by co-owners Brad Casanova and Steven Anan—not only knew they wanted to be different, but that they had to be if they were going to make their mark in the city’s popular West Asheville neighborhood.
Inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s principles of analytical psychology—specifically his work on the collective unconscious and its archetypes—the brewery is a conceptual one, to say the least. It specializes in “complex, mindful, living beer” brewed with traditional Belgian brewing practices. Capturing that ethos in a logo and, later, on cans, is neither easily said nor done. Enter Sean Jones, or Humid Daze as he’s known on Instagram.
“The problem they were having was this agency was trying to make them this scientist with beakers and all this stuff,” Jones says about his introduction to the Archetype team, which happened through a high school friend married to Anan after the agency hired to create the brewery’s branding delivered a cartoonish lab tech for its logo. The problem wasn’t only that the brewery was inspired by a psychologist, not some mad scientist, but also that the owners were trying to open a brewery that didn’t succumb to beer bro culture and the crafty design tropes that were popular at the time. “I told him, ‘If you give me two days, I’ll come up with a logo that’s better than this.’”
The logo he designed quickly became the official one for the brewery—a bold letter “A” with tick marks around it. Following his success with the logo, Jones was asked to design the label art for the brewery’s first run of cans: The Explorer IPA, Cowboy Poet lager, and Talking to Plants witbier. This is where Jones, an Orlando-based illustrator and painter, was able to tap into his artistic background with a trio of labels that have a contemporary art quality—a combination of colorful painted landscapes and stylized figures. Cowboy Poet, for example, depicts a desert scene across its can with a lone man lying in the sun with hat covering his face and a book on his chest.
When it comes to the process of creating label art, Jones says that he and Anan ask, “Can we think of these cans more as a conversation piece that speaks to what the experience of the beer is? Let’s just allow the branding and the information for the beer to be functional and allow the label to really be a can experience and a story.” Sometimes that story is a reflection of what’s happening inside the can, as is the case with Cue the Sun, a West Coast IPA loaded with five different types of hops. Jones created a beer label that matched the drinking experience—a sun-soaked forest scene that captures the warming sensation of drinking a higher ABV beer.
Around the same time that Jones was designing the first labels for Archetype, he launched his brand Humid Daze. “I started Humid Daze out of necessity because every job I kept taking kept getting me further and further away from personal work,” Jones says. By day, he is a graphic designer for Maven Creative, an advertising and branding agency in Orlando. “Humid Daze was one of those things where I just wanted to make work that didn’t have any constraints whatsoever.” The name pays tribute to his adopted home of Florida and constant battle with the Sunshine State’s wet weather as well as his psychedelic style.
“I want to create work that evokes a feeling—that provokes a reaction in the sense that it’s less common than what you see in traditional branding or advertising,” he says. According to Jones, this sort of avant-garde art is increasingly common in contemporary graphic design work, and he’s inspired by other designers leading this trend. For Jones, Swedish brewer Omnipollo epitomizes this movement and a trip to its Stockholm beer bar solidified his desire to work with beer. “They are such an inspiration and they just did not give a shit about the norms.”
His latest project with Archetype, which was put on hold due to COVID-19, might be the ultimate representation of breaking the rules and putting the art before the beer. According to Jones, the challenge he presented to Anan and the brewing team was, “Why don’t you let me create artwork and then you base a beer off the artwork I’m creating?” They whole-heartedly accepted and he drafted the art, but when the city began requiring businesses to close their doors, the brewery went into survival mode and the project was back-burnered.
For now, Jones is continuing to help with one-off label projects. His designs have also made their way onto shirts and glassware, and on more than one occasion fans of the art have requested prints of the labels. One of his most popular designs appeared on Timely Surrender saison. The saison was a seasonal release and the Archetype team wanted to capture that sentiment without screaming summer. The figure of a woman floating in a body of water underneath a hazy sun does just that. “Nothing we do is ever going to have an umbrella and a beach,” Jones says. And that’s a good thing.