I'm a massive fan of hot sauce - I can't get enough of the stuff! But there's a bunch of people who don't enjoy their tongue being on fire, so I thought to myself, "What if there was a sauce that was marketed the complete opposite way?"
I've seen a lot of 'cool' sauces out there, but none that are branded in a similar way that hot sauces are.
My brain started to tingle...
(...much like my tongue usually would be!)
I started with some idea generation for illustrations that could be included in the brand. I soon realised it's much more difficult to think of things that are cold than things that are hot, but there was enough there I liked of which I could build upon.
After a while I decided to combine a bunch of these ideas to create this lil' dude! As usual when creating a character for a brand I like to keep them gender neutral and constrained to a specific race.
This product would be targeted towards sauce-lovers that don't like torturing themselves, and that's the only thing that matters here!
The text logo is fairly simple, and I honestly didn't spend much time on it. I went in to this project wanting the illustrative assets to carry the brand, and so as long as the text does the job I'm happy!
One thing I did like was how the 'O' in SO sits above the 'I' in Crispy - *pats myself on the back*.
In terms of the colour scheme, again, I wanted to contrast those of which you would see on a typical hot sauce brand. Blue is the obvious choice for me being a contrasting colour to the yellows and oranges of fire, and I wanted to include another cold colour as the secondary. The pink colour is a bit of a curveball but having this highlight colour really gives the branding another dimension.
Right, time to think of some promotional material! I found this great mockup online for a sauce bottle where not only I could edit the label but also the seal too! This helped me to really experiment with how the logo could look on the bottle.
I decided on the tagline "Can't handle the heat?" being the subsequent question to "Can you handle the heat?", which is commonly used as a tagline on hot food products.
Using more illustrations from my idea generation I then created the mountain landscape to sit in the backdrop of the design, and had the character lick the bottle like a lamp post. I used a halftone brush to add some texture to the design, which I think symbolises a frosty / snowy environment quite well!
Lastly, I wanted to see what some packaging would look like for the brand. Most of the packaging for products that really catch my eye are ones that a super clean and mostly quite simple.
By using the dark grey as a base colour for the lid of the box I could use the full colour logo on the front, along with the character. Adding in a paper band was a great way to show how the logo could be used as a pattern, and seeing as I had used all the colours on the lid I wanted to keep it simple by using just the blue.