Leveraging the familiar counter culture of the Old West bandit

Our design studio was tasked to create the logo design & weed packaging for Smokey and the Bandit.

It is commonly known that weed was highly popular among bandits, gangsters, you name it.

But instead of typical weed-styling approach we used as a base of the design the visual language of tattooing.

At the heart of the design is the bandit and it’s death soul partner of different times and nations.

Illustration effectively moves between the simple and iconographic to the the finely detailed and illustrative, from flash sheet imagery to the more unusual, from the current and mainstream to the counter-cultural roots of tattooing.

Smokey and the Bandit is a mainstream product, and as such, favours imagery that exists in a comfortable middle ground, one that avoids any specific sub-cultures, be those that are a little edgier or lean towards what might be described as trite. There is a sense of quality, an understanding of the breadth of the market and leverages the familiar whilst also managing to appear distinctive and clear in its communicative intention, particularly when given its context within the weed market.