Sheetz is one of the largest convenience store chains in the Northeast who have been expanding their ability to sell Beer & Wine in store. To help promote this beer selling expansion, Sheetz paired with a fellow Pennsylvanian company in Rusty Rail Brewing Company to sell a limited edition beer that's infused with Sheetz Bros. Coffee.
The client approached me with this project not having much direction in mind. They only knew the brewery, flavor, and had the name "project coffee hopz". My first instinct on hearing the name was to go with a science theme. With the science direction in mind, I started some sketches to find the style of the illustrations.
Those three concepts above: the science lab across all four cans, the floating hands pouring coffee into the beer can, and the frankenstein monster and his bride hybrid were the inital concepts sent to the client. While I liked these concepts, I had the lingering feeling that perhaps the focus should be on a central character. With this central character in mind, I did some research on classic sci-fi novel covers, watched my favorite clips of Doc Brown from Back To The Future, and topped it off with some episodes of Rick & Morty. From all that research, I sent along a new pencil and mock color sketch to the client of my new mad scientist which you can see below.
The client was thrilled with the "mad scientist" concept and was ready to move forward with that direction. The inital designs were useful as well, as they wanted to incorporate the coffee pouring into the beer can into the mad scientist design.
The only other note at this stage was the name and label information would be handled by the Sheetz design team, so I only needed to focus on producing the scientist illustration, along with some background decorations.
Below you will find a more detailed shot of the Mad scientist, various photographs of the can, and the tasting glasses & can cooler made for the launch. The illustration was also used for other promotional material including large in store standees and shirts that are not pictured below. Additionally, The illustration was also used on a web page for the project, but that has been archived after it sold out.
