Jose Cuervo Brand ID

Jose Cuervo Brand Expression & Custom Typefaces

Jose Cuervo was looking to rebrand it’s visual presence in North America, and tapped their AoR Mekanism to tackle the giant undertaking. Mekanism creatives envisioned a set of custom, hand painted typefaces that would be lovingly created by authentic Mexican artists in the historic and age-old style made famous in the region.

Artist Abraham Lule was selected to be that artist. A versatile typographer and designer, Abraham was able to interpret the client’s needs—and after a lengthy discovery process—was able to nail down 6 ownable styles that would be suitable for all the client’s marketing needs across multiple channels and contexts. Abraham painted each letterform on acetate, and then scanned each into the computer for a digital output.

Once the English alphabets and characters were designed and approved, immensely talented typographer and font programmer Ben Kiel of XYZ Type was tapped to turn these designed letterforms into a programmable raster and vector font files, ensuring that whichever social agency or marketer took possession of the fonts, each would have a typeset kit of letters that allowed them to produce consistent and cohesive Cuervo brand expressions with a few strokes of the keyboard, rather than a complicated approval workflow through Cuervo’s mothership brand team.

In 2020, Jose Cuervo tapped Mekanism to build out bi-coastal out-of-home campaign that would tout it’s Tradicional and Ready to Drink offerings to audiences nationwide. Utilizing the brand expression I produced the year previous, we built out a series of placements that would stretch our compositions to hundreds of detail-heavy, unique specs and aspect ratios.

This campaign featured sky banners, boats, transit and roadside placements, and yielded positive results for the brand for product awareness and recognition, and was refreshed three times.