Design on Draft: Breweries & Beyond

October 23, 2025 – April 13, 2026

Beer shelves today are a design exhibit, especially around Chicago: branding, mascots, crests, creatures, landmarks, systems, and drawings. Each label starts with a brew house, a community, and a designer trying to catch your eye, and your heart. Design on Draft: Breweries & Beyond gathers that energy. We invited breweries across the region to send cans, tap handles, marketing pieces, merch, or whatever best tells their story. Then, we collage it into the gallery, not as a top-down “best of,” but as a living snapshot of the design of beer.

Explore hundreds of cans that show the visual language of beer, alongside piles of ephemera and branded objects you have seen in taprooms. Try your hand at bar games and pinball machines tied to brewery culture. Spot historic artifacts, including a curious old bottle linked to stories from the Great Chicago Fire. Along the way, follow a quick-hit timeline that puts today’s label explosion in context, from unlabeled bottles and stone litho showpieces to craft-era breakouts and the can revolution. Leave your mark by designing a label of your own.

Design on Draft is in partnership with the Beer Culture Center.