In its packaging and branding design, The Young Jerks take design cues from the “underbelly of commercial art”

Have you ever seen design that perfectly complements culture? Well now you have. The Young Jerks are a design studio specialising in packaging, branding and copywriting, straight out of Brooklyn and Philadelphia, led by Dan Cassaro and Dan Christofferson. When you look at its breadth of work, it’s clear that the team go far beyond constructing identities that represent the mouth watering additions to the food and beverage industry; they create an aesthetic world that delicately points to the desired audience’s way of life.

The Young Jerks team have a “soft spot for the underdogs,” Dan Cassaro tells us. This includes early-stage startups, and any and all brands “willing to get weird with us,” he adds. Throughout the projects you can get a real feeling of an intuitive process of creating and a sound understanding of the customer’s experience. Take Sunday Beer for example – a light craft lager for which the studio produced the identity, packaging and copy – where every decision points to a specific lifestyle. The fine-line lettering and blue-and-white minimalist aesthetic is evocative of a young, urban crowd that may enjoy a lager and a sweet brunch on a Sunday, but are still health conscious and care about supporting independent craft beer. Or the identity for Coastal Ghosts, a botanical brandy drink, that may have a similar audience, but points more to a cocktail lover who wants to recreate the bar experience at home.

This attention to the emotional experience of people while engaging with food and drink, has served The Young Jerks beyond the industry. Recently constructing the branding, packaging, promotion campaign, photography and game design for its new two-player tabletop game, Snakes of Wrath, its knack for cultivating a design that ponders interaction and relationships has truly come to the fore. Dan says that these aesthetics come from a range of inspirations within “the underbelly of commercial art” and some of the “murkier, less celebrated corners of graphic design history,” he shares. “We take a special joy in making things that feel inviting but strange, familiar but unplaceable,” he adds. But what this shows us is that merging what may be disregarded as trashy, off-centre, or inelegant design, is sometimes more in line with culture and our binded experiences, and that may be what makes the The Young Jerks so unique, they take all of this and make it satisfying to the eye.