Rascals Brewing Brewery Tour: Experiential Environmental Design
Project Roles:
Art Director - Tríona O’Donoghue
Responsibilities: Concept development, storyboarding, experience design, typography boards, commissioning artists.
Mural Artwork: KOOF
Malt Wall Installation: Geraldine Coakley
This project turns the brewing process into a spatial visitor experience. Environmental graphics, typography and interactive installations guide visitors through each stage of brewing, helping explain the brewing process in a clear and engaging way.
A visual and interactive brewery tour translating the brewing process into an immersive spatial journey. The experience combines installation art, murals, dimensional typography and interactive elements to guide visitors through each stage of brewing.
Concept Development
Early sketches explored how the brewing process could be translated into spatial experiences. Each stage of brewing was reimagined through installation art, murals and interactive elements that allow visitors to visually and physically engage with the process. The goal was to transform a technical manufacturing process into a narrative journey visitors could follow as they move through the brewery.
Designing the Brewery Journey
The tour was structured as a sequence of stops representing each stage of brewing:
Ingredients Hero Wall • Malt Room • Mash & Lauter • Boil & Whirlpool • Cool • Fermentation & Conditioning • Packaging / Aging • Tasting
Visitors move through the space while the tour guide explains each step of the brewing process. Installations and graphics at each stop support the storytelling and help make the process visually understandable.
Designing the Brewery Journey
Each stage of the brewing process is marked by a dimensional typographic board. These act as visual anchors for the tour guide while reinforcing the narrative structure of the experience.
The boards were designed and produced my me. I created the typography compositions and spray-painted the graphics myself, combining dimensional lettering with bold geometric forms to create strong focal points within the brewery environment. Interactive elements were incorporated at several stops to make the tour more engaging.
For example:
Ingredients Hero Wall: Displays the different malts used in the brewery’s beers. Visitors can enter the malt room to smell and taste the grains.
Mash & Lauter: Visitors can spin a propeller mechanism to demonstrate how the mash is mixed during brewing.
Cool: A stop where visitors can smell the hops used in the brewing process.
Fermentation & Conditioning: A wooden tank game allows visitors to spin a wheel illustrating the fermentation equation: Sugar + Yeast → CO₂ + Alcohol
The bold graphic compositions make each stop instantly recognisable while maintaining a cohesive visual language throughout the tour. The typography boards combine dimensional lettering with bold geometric graphics to create striking focal points within the brewery environment.
Environmental Art Direction
Large-scale murals and environmental graphics create a vibrant backdrop for the tour installations. These murals introduce colour and movement into the industrial brewery setting while visually linking the different stages of the brewing process.
Muralist: KOOF
The graphic environment helps transform the brewery from a purely functional space into an engaging visitor experience.
Production & Installation
The installations were fabricated using layered materials, stencil painting and dimensional lettering. A combination of masking, spray techniques and hand assembly was used to create the bold graphic surfaces and sculptural typography elements.
Careful material choices ensured the installations were durable while maintaining a handcrafted aesthetic suited to the brewery environment.
Concept & Adaptation
The grain wall installation was originally conceived as a full-height illuminated geometric composition, using brewing grains as texture contained within a framework of pipes. As shown in the concept sketches, it was intended to be the hero wall that would kick-start the tour — a visual celebration of grain as the foundation of beer. Due to budget and fabrication constraints, the design had to be adapted while maintaining the core concept.
Installation artist Geraldine Coakley developed a creative and effective solution that translated the original idea into a buildable installation, preserving its visual impact while working within the project constraints.
Final Experience
The completed brewery tour combines installation art, murals and dimensional typography to create an engaging visual narrative that guides visitors through the brewing process. Each stage of brewing becomes a physical moment within the space, allowing visitors to learn about the craft of brewing through a combination of storytelling, graphics and interactive design.
The space turns the brewing process into an immersive journey, using graphics, installations and storytelling to bring each stage to life.
