40/40

My friend Ben Kaman is eleven days older than me. I’ve worked for his family’s company on and off since I was 15, but I didn’t really know him well until we were in college, when I was drawing caricatures at Geauga Lake and he was across the lake drawing portraits at Sea World Ohio. While both of those parks have crashed and burned over the last twenty years or so—leaving behind a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic wasteland that I see every time I drive out to Home Depot—we’ve stayed friends, so it made since to have a joint 40th birthday celebration. I made the invitations.

We did 7” x 5” postcards.

While I’ve designed a few beer labels here and there, I haven’t had the pleasure of designing a malt liquor label before. It has always struck me as hilarious, how the regal branding of Olde English 800 and Colt 45 and King Cobra—and, to a lesser extent, Mickey’s, my malt liquor of choice after going broke buying art supplies at the end of the semesters in college—contrasts so heavily with what malt liquor actually tastes like. Here’s the thing; no one drinks malt liquor because it tastes good. People drink malt liquor because it comes in large quantities and it’s cheap and there are Edward Fortyhands parties where you duct tape one to each hand until you finish them. But if you knew nothing about what malt liquor is and then saw the gilded can designs, you might think that you’re drinking the mead of royals.

I don’t know if the kids still drink this stuff these days. What I do know is that the 40s that I drank in college were the ancestors of the White Claws everyone seems to like these days. At least, I assume so because, if you look at the can closely enough, you’ll see that White Claw is a malt beverage. Maybe they just rebranded St. Ide’s Special Brew and poured it into cans? My buddy Mike drank those because he didn’t like beer and playing beer pong with screwdrivers doesn’t usually work out well for anyone.

Anyway, enough talk of being young in the 1990s. I’m pretty sure I found Mr. Surly here in another ad archived on Wikimedia Commons, and I used Photoshop for the rest of it. I do a lot of little projects like this, and while they can be time-consuming (this one wasn’t), the time always flies by when you’re giggling like an idiot at what’s on your screen..