Hello.

This document is a toolkit, designed to help everyone who touches the Great Central Brewing Company brand make the best decisions for it. It’s meant to be a guide, not a restriction.

If you’re reading this, these tools exist for you to:

Define

What the Great Central Brewing Company brand is, what it is not, and what we want to do

Inform

All the work we make that represents GCBC

Provide

A guide for the brand as we grow and evolve

Unite

All we say and do, so we communicate with one voice

Help

The GCBC brand grow

Inspire

Work that we are proud of, work that accurately reflects back and projects out into the world the true spirit of GCBC

Thank you for representing this brand we all believe in.

What/How/
Why

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle

What

Great Central
Brewing Company is a collaborative brewery. We brew great, timeless beers, support growing craft beer brands and small businesses with big ideas in our community.

How

By leveraging our experience & expertise in the business of making.

Why

Because, in making together, we find our purpose.

Brand Mission

We work everyday to serve ideas and our community with heart, vitality and muscle. We’re dedicated to keeping the Chicago-born spirit of ingenuity pumping and alive in the world.

Simply because there’s always a solution, always a way forward.

Brand Values

These are the values at the core of the Great Central Brewing Company brand. We keep these in our hearts in all we do, say and create that represents the brand. We ask ourselves these questions to help guide our words, actions and ideas the Great Central way.

Community

Does this serve the greater good?

How can it be good for all?

What is our contribution?

Integrity

Does this move our community forward and grow opportunity for all of us to keep making?

How can we build a better beer/ brand/ community/ world?

How can we lead the way?

Levity

To make beer for a living is a joyful privilege. Stay humble and don’t forget, it’s beer.

Are you having fun? How can you make someone happy today?

Audience

Makers. America is a great experiment. Chicago is “the city on the make.”

Yes, our experiment is flawed, but it’s in motion. Yes, “on the make” once meant bribable (and sometimes still does) but it also means action. Let’s make “on the make” mean something new again. After all, we made brownies, the skyscraper and Michael Jordan. We reversed the direction of the river and raised our city five feet, literally out of the muck, so we could grow.

Our motto is “I will” — perpetually in motion, in optimism. Making is in our blood. Learning is in our bones. Our hearts are made of “try it again.” Great Central believes everyone is a maker who picks up a tool and tries. It’s a world view, not a demographic. And these are our people. Our customers. Our clients. Our partners, collaborators, co-conspirators and our community.

Brand Archetype

The Hero

Goal

Expert mastery in a way that improves the world

Traits

Courageous, bold, honorable, strong, confident, inspirational

Greatest Fear

Weakness, vulnerability, being a coward, failure

Core Desire

To prove one’s worth through courageous acts

Strategy

To be as strong and competent as possible

Weakness

Arrogance, always needing another battle to fight, can appear aloof

Marketing Niche

Make a positive mark on the world, solve major problems or enable/inspire others to do so

Motto

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” “I will,” “Try again”

Examples

Nike, BMW, Duracell, FedEx, USMC, Great Central
Brewing Company

Functional Promise

We promise great beer brewed to perfection every time and the practical, honest business support our community needs to keep making.

Emotional Promise

We promise to invest our hearts, minds and resources in our community to keep the Chicago-born spirit of can-do and will-do alive in the world.

Cultural Enemy

Fear of risk.

Chicago is a city with big dreams and big shoulders. Historically, we’ve put those strong arms to work for our dreams. But we can also be too grounded, too practical, too afraid to risk what we have to go after what could be. We’re afraid to fail, to not put food on the table, to compromise our pride, to put those we love in danger.

Great Central exists to provide a strong foundation for makers to build on, to keep themselves on the make.

Brand Voice

Motivational

Confident

Self-disciplined

Direct

Honest

Light-hearted

Inclusive

Always raising others up where & when we can

Excited

Brand Guardrails

Great Central Brewing Company embodies the qualities listed on the left without being the qualities on the right. These guardrails help guide us in nuanced creative decisions.

Is

Without Being

Classic

Kitschy

Timeless

Static

Innovative

Trendy

Industrious

Greedy

Rooted

Old-fashioned

Communal

Singular

Independent

Egotistical

Joyful

Juvenile

Moodboard

We are inspired by modern and traditional German design. Clear grids, geometric shapes, clean designs and strong colors compose our visual language to create a sense of energy and authenticity.

Grid System

The city of Chicago is built on a perfect grid — and so is the Great Central brand. With this grid as our foundation, we create a consistent and seamless structure for everyone interacting with these guidelines. Just as it does for our city, the grid brings balance, repetition and precision to everything we produce, all while giving us a controlled environment in which to experiment.

8px Grid

This grid is flexible enough to create visually beautiful designs and simplifies the way developers code when the grid is applied to a digital environment.

Typography

The heritage of the Great Central Brewing Company is rooted in German beer — because that is the standard of perfection in brewing. So, our design system is inspired by German design, including our type choices. The type faces are inspired by German tradition, yet clear, modern and fresh.

Use

All type treatments utilizing the Bely Display typeface should follow the guidelines below. Do draw inspiration and guidance from the column on the left. Do not ever treat type in the ways demonstrated in the column on the right.

Bely Display is meant to be used only for titles, subtiles and quotes.

Never use Bely Display for paragraphs.

Our grid is based on a 8px system (See Grid System for more detail). For typography, this means the line-height must be a multiple of 8 (16, 24, 32, 40, etc.). It is important to note that the font size doesn’t have to be a multiple of 8.

Be mindful about the contrast ratio. WCAG 2.0 level AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 for large text.

Use

All type treatments utilizing the Din 2014 typeface should follow the guidelines below. Do draw inspiration and guidance from the column on the left. Do not ever treat type in the ways demonstrated in the column on the right.

Din 2014 is meant to be used on subtitles, regular blocks of text or quotes.

If you are combining weights, make sure you use “Regular” and “Bold.”

Our grid is based on a 8px system (See Grid System for more detail). For typography, this means the line-height must be a multiple of 8 (16, 24, 32, 40, etc.). It is important to note that the font size doesn’t have to be a multiple of 8.

We generally use Bely Display for main titles. You can Use Din 2014 for main titles as long as you have a valid reason.

Color copied to clipboard

Color Palette

We have three primary colors and an extended palette based on the two most important colors.

These three primary colors can be applied to typography, logos, backgrounds and all our visual assets. The extended palette provides enough flexibility to add contrast and depth to compositions.

We recommend that you use the extended palette to add shadows and lights, to specify secondary titles, and to create UI components such as hover effects.

Pure White

PURE WHITE




RGB 255 255 255

HEX FFFFFF

CMYK 0 0 0 0

#FFFFFF

GC Orange

GC ORANGE | 800

PANTONE 485 CP




RGB 220 71 37

HEX DD3C27

CMYK 8 87 100 1

#DD3C27
Extended Palette

900

#C23A1D
GC Orange

800

#DC4625

700

#EA4D29

600

#F9542E

500

#FF5A32

400

#FF734F

300

#FF8D6E

200

#FFAD97

100

#FFCDC0

50

#FBEAE8

GC Black

GC DARK GREY | 900

PANTONE 19-3904 TSX

Char



RGB 39 43 47

HEX 272B2F

CMYK 75 66 60 63

#272B2F
Extended Palette
GC Black

900

#272B2F

800

#393F46

700

#48525B

600

#586571

500

#657482

400

#7C8793

300

#939CA5

200

#B3B8BD

100

#D3D4D5

50

#EDEDED