Surly Launches 2022 Featured Darkness Artist Search

From Surly:

The search for Surly’s 2022 Featured Darkness Artist is officially underway!

Yes, this is a little earlier than previous years, but:

1. Due to our industry’s supply chain issues, package design tends to be due by, say, last week, and
2. You might have some down time over the winter holidays to sketch something out that blows us away.

For those new to the process, we select one artist to create label art for our 2022 Darkness line–the original, the barrel-aged, and all variants. This designer will be creating, narrating, and defining Darkness for an entire year. The art will be featured on boxes, cans, posters, shirts, and more. Given how the internet works, it will also be on an unlicensed adult Happy Meal in a former Soviet Bloc country, but it’s hard to really plan for that. That said, Estonian McNuggets look metal as hell.

Basically, we’re throwing you the keys and letting you drive one of our brewery’s most beloved, legendary brands. No pressure!

We’re looking for unique work that integrates your own creative style with the Surly brand, like the art created by our previous artists: Brandon Holt, Erica Williams, Josh “JAWSH” Lemke, Brent Schoonover, Michael Berglund, Aesthetic Apparatus, DWITT, Nic Skrade, Adam Martin, Adam Turman, Adam Sward, Michael Iver Jacobsen, Tim Chapman, Barbara Guttman, and Justin Bergo.

To be clear, this isn’t a pat-on-the-back-and-free-beer job. This is a full-fledged paid gig. With that, we’re expecting the chosen artist to work through concepts and designs with the crew at Surly and deliver on a specific timeline. Here’s what you need to do:

• Submit three (3) art files in .jpeg or .pdf format for review. These should be working examples that represent your design aesthetic. We’re not asking you to design anything new for this project.
• Yes, the art needs to look fantastic on a bottle, but it also needs to look great on a t-shirt, in a social media post, on a custom mug, in print ads, beer hall advertisements, website banners, etc. Your design should be translatable across all these mediums.
• The ideal candidate should be able to design, render, prepare and export print-ready EPS or AI files. Hand drawn files are great for entry, but we also need you to be able to convert them for print.

If you have what it takes, the form is below. Deadline for submissions is January 17, 2022. We hope to select an artist by January 24, with the assignment lasting roughly four weeks per project (Darkness, Variants, Barrel-Aged). Good luck!

Online Form – 2022 Darkness Artist Search