↓ Brewdog LAOUT

So this is the story of how one of the biggest challenges of my life led to one of the greatest collaborations of my career. It starts during the 2020 lockdowns. Like many others I was not in a great place, mentally. Running regularly was helping, and so was the That Peter Crouch Podcast, which I listened to religiously. 

It helped me clear my mind with footy and laughs, and provided some much-needed escapism. The time prior to lockdown had been equally tough. My son had suffered complications after the birth – he hadn’t been breathing and had to go on a ventilator for his first few weeks. Thankfully, he’s fine now, but the stress at the time had felt colossal. Worries about the kids, money, the business, Covid – it was all just swamping me and my mental health was not in a great place, but the podcast made me feel like I was part of something. It certainly lifted some of that weight.

At some point – maybe on a run or in a fever dream – I had the idea of giving something back to the pod, of becoming even more involved. I can’t quite say why? Certainly, the fact it has 12 million listeners may well have played a part!

Either way, I popped an illustration “Dr John Kellogs, South Africa 2010” on to socials, tagging the guys in. It was basically a depiction of the previous episode, incorporating lots of different elements for the podcast. The team ended up liking it on socials, I was super chuffed. Job done.

Then the next week I was doing my normal run and listening to the podcast when they started talking about the illustration. Dr John! It was a huge buzz for them to just mention it, but in the end they really engaged and chatted for a while about all the details. I was so happy and it really lifted my spirits. That could have easily been the end of it, and to be honest I would have been happy enough with that. But towards the end of that series they began creating their own beer on the show to drink while recording. It was half Lager, half Stout – which they nicknamed LAOUT. Then BrewDog approached the podcast and said that they could get involved to actually brew one for real, at which point things just went bananas. 

They started to ask listeners to get involved to make it happen. Did anyone have any taglines? Or songs? Or visuals? Could anyone do a design for the can? Having been mentioned previously, it felt like a long shot getting another mention but the prospect of feeling that buzz and connection again was too tantalising.  

Straight away an idea hit me and I got cracking. As I was busy illustrating my missus would walk past my screen some days and be like “What the heck are you working on?!” I felt guilty not doing client work for a few days, but once I had my teeth into it I couldn’t let it go.

I wanted the design to capture all kinds of elements of the show and so I packed as many details in there as I could: talking points, including some quite controversial ones. I wanted it to be noticed. Get people talking.

When it was ready, I sent it off and sure enough it was mentioned on the following week’s podcast. Of course, they had been inundated with entries, and it didn’t stop with me. Every week for the next few weeks they kept mentioning and posting new submissions. Just feeling part of the project was brilliant, and I knew the competition was stiff, but my entry began getting a lot of love across socials and seemed to be emerging as the listeners’ favourite.