I am not a beer snob or anything but I am always on the lookout for something new. Luckily my local Meijer has a pretty decent selection of craft beer. Previously I wasn’t aware how hard it is for a small brewery to get regional or even national distribution until my friend Rob Vrabel, home brewer, schooled me about it.
If you know me, you know I have a thing for great packaging. I am always on the look out for attention to detail, even in the beer isle.
This week, Redhook Long Hammer IPA totally took my attention. I have never seen it at the store but it’s package design stopped me in my tracks. So of course I had to buy it.
Recently Re-aligned
Rob alerted me of Redhook’s recent re-branding and re-alignment of their packaging. Beervana did a great job dissecting the new look. It really shows they have insight not only in to themselves but also their current and potential audience.
My Thoughts
Simple Colors - The package isn’t overly designed, simple, straight to the point. With a wall of images on other packages in the isles, the solid green, white and red stand out to the scanning eye. I just had to know what this beer was that decided they needed to make a statement.
Bold Graphness – IPA’s come in all different tastes. In the top left of the package on both the front and sides there is a graph that shows where this particular one sits, Bold. But it doesn’t just state it is bold it also gives you where it sits in the realm of beers. “Refreshing, Smooth, Bold, and Dark”, you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.
Microcopy – On various areas of the package there are some great examples of a copy writer who understands how to connect to their audience. Some examples are “Long Hammer IPA is a big fan of dry hopping, which sounds much dirtier than it is.”, “30 years of cheer”, “well built brew”, and “Redhook would always enjoy himself responsibly. Do the same.” Just to name a few. Check out the bottom which tells a great story too.
I’m turning 30. Let’s have some brews
Who knows what led you to read the bottom of my six-pack. Maybe it fell and landed upside down. Maybe you’re recycling. Maybe you’ve completely run out of decent reading material. But you know what? The why doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we’re having a little chat. Call me sentimental, but turning 30 has made me appreciate the times we habe out together all the more. So crack open a beer and let’s have some time.
Cheers, Redhook.
P.S. If you’re ever in Woodinville, WA or Portsmith, NH, be sure to swing by one of my pubs. Let’s have a beer and I’ll show you around the brewery.
Redhook himself - Inspecting the packaging a little bit more you will notice a little guy starting at the bottom of the mountain. Turning to the side as I took it off the shelf I notice he made it half way up, I thought that was pretty cool. Only when I took a beer out did I notice he made it to the top. Success! Just like me. This progressive climb matched my progressive experience with the product. After this I was totally impressed!
Taste
After all of this the beer could have tasted horrible and I would still have been impressed. But as suspected it tasted as good as the amount of detail paid put in to the package design. Probably one of my favorite IPA’s. Great job Redhook, all the way around! Trust me, if I find myself in Woodinville, WA or Portsmith, NH I’ll be sure to stop in.
Overall Grade
In the end I am giving Redhook an “A” for their entire package experience, taste and for the ability to gain an advocate with their attention to detail.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and Foundation is by far one of my favorite, it is produced by Kevin Rose. In the recent episode Kevin interviewed Jesse Jacobs, founder of Samovar Tea Lounge. The episode centered around his journey opening a brink and mortar store but one section, about nine minutes in, really got me thinking. I encourage you to watch it if you haven’t.
“We have time, we just waste it.
Say there is two tea cups, one empty and the other half full.
The half full cup can only be filled half more. The empty tea cup is full of limitless potential. You can put anything in it.
Instead of living life always half full, always static, buzzing, full of todo lists, emails and everything else. How then instead can we live life to get as empty as possible to allow for that limitless potential.”
Today I noticed some changes to the Twitter list UI. Upon viewing a profile I thought to myself, hmm, this looks cleaner. I then realized a button was missing, the list selection. Looking around I couldn’t find it anywhere. Clicking around I noticed they moved lists into the options menu, where I would normally go to Block or Spam a user.
This make logical sense especially if they are planning more features to go in this menu. But I have two problems with the change.
It adds another click and wait to add someone to a list
Previously that button was always associated with the negative actions for a user
Neither of these problems are earth shattering but it changes how I use twitter.com. I put every person I follow (and some I don’t) into a list. Some of my listsare overflowing and a change like this leads me to believe Twitter is moving away from lists. Over the course of design changes, originally you were to be able to access lists on the right column directly as links. Now they are hidden above the main stream and even then it doesn’t show you all your lists in one click.
Less and less emphasis on lists
Changes like this can make a large impact on how users interact with a service. Although Twitter isn’t publishing future plans things like this are great insight into what they think are important.
Lists show expertise and authority
For me, seeing what lists a user is on tells more about them then their bio, the number of followers, or even who we follow in common. Twitter lists are like crowd sourced tags for users. It’s an objective way to tell people what you are all about. The harder Twitter makes it to list people the less they will get used and harder it will be one less way to determine the “authority” of a user.
Looks like Twitter just updated their “following you” email format. I haven’t seen a reference to it on the Twitter Blog yet so it might be pushed out slowly. I have included screenshots of the old and new layouts above for comparison. A few things have been changing:
Informationally
The subject now includes the person’s twitter handle
Removed the “follows x users who follow you” (think this was a good removal, no value lost)
No more “What’s Next?” to explain how to send an @reply or DM (is this assumed now?)
Graphically
Much more in line with updated Twitter homepage and overall look
Not sure what that check box is doing up there in the top right (it is not clickable)
The tweets/following/followers placement is far easier to scan
The large blue “View @person’s profile” is hard to miss as a next step
Underlines have been removed from all links. The link and text colors are a little too close for my comfort, I wonder how #a11y experts think about the change.
Overall I think Twitter is moving in the right direction but still has a little ways to go. I would love to see the location added back in, links being underlined and the addition of how many lists the user is on. I think the number of lists is a great indication of the impact the twitter has in their community.
Something that has been severely lacking in the official Twitter desktop app has been “multi-window” or multiple view ability. I recently moved from the official app (which I loved because it utilizes stream) to Twitteriffic because it was much easier to follow lists and saved searches.
Open in New Window
The newest update to the Twitter desktop app has completely changed that. Although it is not perfect, you can now take any view and “Open in New Window”. This pops it out of the app into its own fully resizable and movable box. It’s not yet to the point of Nambu’s multi view updating and unread counts but it is a step in the right direction.
I am now totally back on board with the official Twitter app again. Thanks for paying attention guys!
