Heineken Beer
From Curiosity to Craft—Reimagining an Icon
What began as a simple exercise quickly transformed into a deep, deliberate exploration of digital colour, gradients, and lighting. This wasn’t just about making something look “cool”—it was about mastering the technical and artistic principles that give digital illustrations real depth and dimension.
Along the way, the project naturally evolved into a creative tribute to one of the most iconic visuals in the world: Heineken’s unmistakable green bottle. By choosing a brand so universally recognized, we raised the stakes and challenged ourselves to deliver a level of precision, craft, and storytelling that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with global brand standards.
An Unofficial Tribute to a Global Icon.
Heineken’s green bottle is more than packaging—it’s a cultural touchpoint, instantly evoking heritage, quality, and a century of brand equity. With its iconic green bottle and bold red star, Heineken isn’t just a beer—it’s a global symbol for coming together. Whether you’re toasting at a festival, kicking back at a bar, or just enjoying a quiet moment, Heineken connects people across the globe through a shared love of great beer, unforgettable experiences, and timeless craftsmanship.
By selecting such a familiar object as the subject of this project, we created a proving ground for high-end visual craftsmanship.
Project Overview
This self-initiated concept wasn’t about mimicking; it was about understanding. How does light bend and scatter on a transparent surface? How can gradients in a purely vector environment create the illusion of glass? How do you make something digital feel tactile, even human?
For clients, this kind of exploration signals more than technical skill—it demonstrates the depth of thinking, experimentation, and mastery that goes into every tannerstrachanCREATIVE project.
The Challenge
Armed with nothing but Adobe Illustrator’s Pen Tool, Brush Tool, and Gradient Tool, the idea was to set out and create a hyper-realistic vector illustration of Heineken’s iconic green bottle—no 3D rendering, no shortcuts. This meant studying how light and colour truly interact on a three-dimensional, transparent surface, then translating those subtleties into clean, scalable vector shapes.
The result is more than an illustration—it’s proof of concept. It shows how discipline and curiosity can merge to create work that isn’t just visually striking, but also deeply intentional.
For high-end brands, this kind of craft-first, story-rich design thinking is exactly what transforms good visuals into unforgettable ones.
The PROCESS
Design isn’t just execution—it’s investigation. The process behind this concept was an open-ended study in visual nuance: how to simulate the effects of light diffusion, edge softening, and internal glow using only vectors. No pixel-based tools. No 3D renders. Just raw Illustrator craftsmanship.
The first step was to dissect how light behaves through tinted glass—how it refracts, how it darkens along the edges, how it blooms where liquid meets label. From there, a foundation was built out of base shapes, layering gradients with obsessive care. Opacity masks and subtle tonal shifts became essential tools, allowing me to simulate highlights, mid-tones, and shadows without ever leaving the vector environment.
This wasn’t about speed. It was about intentional layering, pixel-perfect calibration, and designing in a way that rewards close attention. The final build became an ecosystem of forms working together to tell a story of light, texture, and transformation.
The RESULTS
The final illustration captures Heineken’s iconic green bottle in full, dimensional form—rendered entirely in Adobe Illustrator. At first glance, it may pass as a studio photograph. But look closer, and you’ll see every curve, highlight, and specular flare is carefully built with scalable vector geometry.
The result is a piece that speaks not just to aesthetics, but to commitment. It demonstrates how far pure vector design can be pushed when every tool is used with intention. This is the kind of work that goes beyond “clean lines” or “bold colours”—it’s about achieving depth, realism, and resonance inside a disciplined creative box.
For brands that want visual identities with weight and wonder, this is the level of care and precision TSC brings to the table.
The TAKEAWAYS
This project was a wonderful thought experiment in creative restraint and obsession. In stripping away the usual conveniences—no raster textures, no trace modes, no blend modes, no 3D—it forces us to fully understand how light works and how to coax realism from pure colour and geometry.
It reminds us that limitations are often the birthplace of breakthrough creative thinking. That with the right mindset, even the most rigid constraints can become opportunities to explore new visual territory.
For any future brand clients, this is the kind of insight we bring to every creative endeavour: deep attention, technical fluency, and a hunger to elevate form into feeling.
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If you’re ready for visuals that do more than look good—if you want design that feels good, that moves people, and that sticks—let’s talk.