Peter Saville and Tate Design Studio create beer can artwork for Switch House pale ale

Tate Design Studio has worked with Peter Saville to create a can design for the Tate’s Switch House beer by Fourpure Brewing Co.

The can features the same colour palette as Saville’s graphic identity for the newly expanded Tate Modern, created with Paul Hetherington and Morph, which showed the gallery’s architecture as an assembly of simplified shapes.

For the can design, Tate Design Studio has flattened the identity like an architectural plan, segmented into geometric shapes in a similarly bold scheme of orange, yellow, pink, turquoise, navy and red, using the bare aluminium as a backdrop. This stripped-back aesthetic was implemented to reflect the materials of the industrial gallery building, explains Tate Design Studio’s graphic designer Mathew Whittington: “We wanted to celebrate the simple materiality of the can and make a gesture that alludes to how the architecture of Switch House meets the raw brick of the original power station.”

Local brewery Fourpure worked with Tate to develop the pale ale, named after the Tate Modern’s new extension by Herzog & de Meuron which opened in June.