November 14, 2021

2022 PubPass Design Reveal

Let's talk die cuts! If you've been a PubPass fan for a while, you've no doubt seen an evolution in our cover designs. For years we printed unique covers for each of our cities. This worked great when we were in just a few cities, but got to be a bit unruly as we surpassed 10. Last year we introduced a circular die cut on our covers, allowing the city code to peek through from the inside. You can check out last year's designs here.

Design Process

This year we wanted to build on the die cut, and we brainstormed a bunch of different ideas. We narrowed it down to our favorite 2:

As much as we loved the idea of building on the PubPass deer theme with the mount, we really couldn't pass up the opportunity to highlight the thing we love the most here at PubPass. Beer. So we set to work designing out the cover in high fidelity and working on the various city illustrations.

Printing Process

In parallel we reached out to our friends at Studio on Fire and began the process of planning for the print production. If you're curious about what that looks like, check this out. Always amazing the level of precision with each of the foil stamps and the final die cut that has very little margin for error.

Once the covers are printed and cut, they're bound to the rest of the pages, or guts as we call them, for each of the various cities. Again, there is a lot of precision around alignment and it's not until we get the first few samples back that we know for certain the die cuts have lined up.

Final Design

We're happy to report that the beer-shaped die cut turned out exactly as we hoped and we're stoked to get these bad-boys in your hands in time for the holiday season. Check out the final books here, they'll be on sale beginning November 15. Cheers!