I have always loved looking at unique tap handles. There are many out there that are fun to look at and help define how you picture their brand. I could never imagine how something so unique could be created. After observing the process from start to finish I still can’t believe how everything came together in the end with only three rounds of designing. I wanted to let you get a look at the evolution of our tap handle from the first rough sketch we submitted to Tap Handles to its completion, which you can see on the right.
Things started with a very basic idea. Jack’s wedding band, which can be seen here, has a hop vine circling it. We did not know exactly what we wanted other than that we wanted to work in this imagery into the overall design. We communicated our idea to Logan Toskey, from Tap Handles, and provided him with a very rough sketch of what we had in mind.
For the first round, Tap Handles presented us with these three designs. We liked elements from all three of them, particularly the direction they were heading with the ring. However, none of the the initial designs really jumped out at us. We took what we liked from the designs and went back to the drawing board on our end. We used every ounce of artistic talent we had to come up with another sketch.
Tap Handles took our idea and ran with it. They created three new designs that implemented the hop vine design in different ways. The third design incorporated our ring in a way we never expected. Using the ring for the hop vines going up the handle was something so elegant and simple, yet we would have never thought of it ourselves. We focused our talks with Logan on expanding this creative direction. There was still a long way to go, but we knew we were headed in the right direction going into the last round of designs.
The last round of design included five much more developed designs based on our feedback: Design 1, Design 2, Design 3, Design 4, Design 5. We were torn between designs two and four, which we felt were both amazing. After much discussion, we went with design four with a copper base, instead of the green as pictured. It will still be several weeks until these tap handles arrive. In the meantime we have some very nice basic tap handles while these are fabricated. We are still amazed at how a couple random ideas came together so eloquently.
