We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Alexander Michelbach about their original and creative Beer Color Swatches design work. Alexander Michelbach is an award-winning communication designer, that makes our world a better place with their original beer color swatches works.
Alexander Michelbach ("AM") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work Beertone Beer Color Swatches. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
AM : There's some Beer Guides on the market but we would like to create one with a complete new approach, at the same time with useful content and cool to handle.
AM : We are planning further editions, German, USA, England, Brazilian Beers and products using Beertone as a Brand, may be next year we are back in A award.
AM : Working in a small team, just me and Daniel, we took almost 4 months, during the process we had to handle some issues but at the end everything worked great.
AM : We are producing by ourselves, at the moment there's no plans to sell or lease the production rights. In the next weeks some companies world wide will present special editions with different special pages.
AM : I'm always looking for something new, to be innovatite.
AM : When we created Beertone we thought that designers/ graphic designers would be the main customer, but there's a lot of Beer enthusiasts out there that liked the product, the idea.
AM : I'm from Brazil, Daniel from Switzerland and we wanted a name that could be spoken in different languages. Thanks to the German and Portuguese. Using our mother languages we decided to use: Tone = Tons (Portuguese) Tone = Töne (German), we took the ö out, because it's complicated for non-german spoken people, and the word Beer, I think, doesn't need further explanation ;-).
AM : We use the usual design tools, photoshop, illustrator, indesign and a lot of prototyping.
AM : The people always smile when they see it.
AM : We had important collaborators from the design area, some brew masters, beer sommeliers.
AM : Technology had a important role in Beertone, without the spectrophotometer we won't be able to habe accuration in our color analysis as we wanted.
AM : The Beertone is completely based on data, research, analysis. We tested each beeer using a spectrophotometer, to measure the absorbance and with this information we got the EBC and SRM color values.
AM : First of all, getting all 202 Beers together, some breweries didn't send them and we had to buy a lot of beer. The Beer Color information was a challenge too, we build a small Beer Laboratory to run all the tests.
AM : We received an email about the competition for 2 or 3 months but we had so much work to do with the data collect process, measurements, that we thought that we had to wait next year to submit the design, but we are very happy and proud that it worked.
AM : The design award and the process to get the design ready to be judged is a great experience, you need to work focused and always looking to get the subscription information better.
