Marx Design’s brand for Departed Spirits celebrates the label’s unabashed, say-it-like-it-is energy

It’s impossible to miss Departed Spirits’ rebellious soul. The Melbourne-based brand is here to shake up the alcohol scene, in a decided departure from craft spirits – a movement that’s taken over the industry in the past few years, ‘with the overzealous use of botanicals, that has your gin tasting like grass clippings with hints of rainforest.’ To subvert the trendy tropes of the industry, and to encapsulate the brand’s riotous voice, New Zealand-based studio Marx Design crafted an identity that’s both crisp and arresting. There were many strands of ideas that informed the design – from the brand’s focus on purity and anti-craft, to their need for functionality, and the label’s inherent sense of chutzpah. To centre this world around an identifiable brand mark, Marx Design crafted a logo which – like any good symbol – opens itself to a world of interpretations. At the heart of each flask sits a portal-esque geometric shape, washed in a gradient of colour. ‘Is it a doorway to new possibilities? A headstone that houses taste cues and speaks to variant flavour? A tunnel that takes you out of the city and into nature?,’ the symbol keeps one guessing, just as it intends to. The utilitarian flask, with its pocketable design, is also a rebellion in its own way. Moving away from the ‘out of the box glass forms’ that dominate the craft spirit market, the smash-proof, tinplate flasks underscore the label’s anti-craft agenda, while becoming the perfect canvas for the light-handed branding. With the brand name on one end, and the details of the variant on the other, the design takes cues from ‘1950s NASA branding,’ resulting in a unique tension between ‘feeling utilitarian, and at the same time, futuristic.’