Burgershop

For our third issue we spoke to Joe Glenister, a visual communicator living in London, about his amazing home brew project and the subsequent brand he designed for the brew (all self initiated might we add). While exploring his site we discovered his other food related project, "Burgershop," and decided to ask him more about his career as a designer, his opinion on fast food branding, and share a little taste of what's to come for our upcoming issue. 

At what point in your life did you realize you were a designer? Have you always felt driven to create?

I’ve always liked drawing and making things, at one point when I was little I said I wanted to be an architect (I didn’t even know what it meant, it just sounded cool). I started to get into design in my last year of 6th Form before University. I never had this great epiphany moment where I was told what I would be, but my Art & Design course was what I was good at, so it felt right to go and study.

What do you hope to communicate with viewers through your work? Do you think that changes from project to project?

I changes depending on what the brief is, or if there’s no brief then it depends on what you feel like saying. I love doing self initiated work because theres no boundaries, and I can say whatever the heck I want and that’s great. On the whole I want people to enjoy it, whether it is subconsciously or because they like a colour I’ve used.

Where did the idea for the Burger shop rebrand come about? How do you feel about the general lack of well designed fast food branding?

I enjoy branding as a task, and I wanted to test myself to see how well I could come up with an idea and see it through the design and fulfill it. There’s definitely been an explosion in the UK of new burger restaurant identities - My aim was to create a brand that held itself together visually and looked appealing but didn’t overstate the fact that it was a shop where you can get a burger, and at the end of the day there are thousands of places to get a burger, so why complicate it?

I absolutely love the logo for Burger Shop...a two dimensional. deconstructed burger. When starting these types of branding projects do you often begin with a logo, or is it something that becomes clearer through the work?

I do have a habit of going straight to my computer to doodle stuff. But sometimes you have to step away and think about what you want to say about a brand/product without worrying about how it’ll look on screen or paper and use it as a base to build on. It’s simple and deconstructed because you can go in and build your own burger, and that’s the bare bones of it.

You have created and developed packaging for beer you brewed yourself, which is quite impressive. Was home brewing something you were interested in pursuing for awhile?

I was interning at an Ad agency in London, and my family noticed how increasingly often I was drinking beer, both in the office on a Friday afternoon and at the pub after finishing. In fact the office got beer delivered to their door (amazing). So my brother bought me a brewing kit for my birthday, and it started from there!

Can you walk us through your brewing process? What were your inspirations behind the project?

It involves boiling things up like barley and wheat for a couple of hours, adding certain things in like hops at very specific times and keeping it at a regular temperature. The painful part is then having to wait for it to ferment for 3 weeks. I was apparently becoming a bit of a beer snob, as I was trying different ones all the time and proclaiming my opinion on them as if I knew the first thing about making beer, so making your own gives you complete control over your final drink, and makes you appreciate how hard it is.

Read the rest of Joe's interview and get more of an insight into his home brewing project in our upcoming third issue! 

In the meantime, check out his site for other great work.