An Austin designer is lending a vintage look to Texas brands

Before freelance designer Zach Wieland was offered a chance to work on a branding project for Lone Star, he was sliding into the company’s DMs like a teen desperate to hear from their favorite pop star. 

“I’d tag them all the time and stuff. I had a Lone Star in my hand in my little profile photo on Instagram. I was interacting with them so much that I think eventually the guy who runs the account … just responded to a message,” Wieland said. “It was like, ‘Oh, I love the beard and your profile picture.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, man, we should definitely work together sometime.’ And he was super into it.”

It resulted in merch for Lone Star’s Core Collection ’23 that includes drink koozies and shirts depicting an armadillo lying on its back drinking a beer. Another design shows an armadillo roper about to capture the creature above the slogan declaring it “the national beer of Texas.” A lot of Wieland’s work is a reimagining of vintage styles before design became a digital medium, and it’s seen in the typefaces and illustrations showing characters in cowboy hats and animals like horses and armadillos. He’s also done work for Shiner and Magellan, the Texas Department of Transportation, Lucchese Boots, and UT running back Bijan Robinson’s Dijon mustard.

 For Wieland, Lone Star was a top five dream client, he says from a table at Deep Eddy Cabaret, a dive bar by an Austin city pool of the same name. He’s wearing a Willie Nelson tee with a white cowboy hat and jeans and talking about how he got into bull riding after working on a project for Austin Gamblers, the pro bull riding team in the city. 

And he’s also drinking a bottle of Lone Star, a beer he’s been a fan of since before he could legally drink. That’s because his childhood home, located by the county line between Austin and Cedar Park, featured a shelved display his dad put up of old box cases of the beer. His current home has a few Lone Star posters from the ’70s and ’80s when one of his idols, visual artist Jim Franklin who is known for his armadillo drawings, worked on branding for the brewing company. 

After gaining confidence from Lone Star and other big projects, Wieland switched to freelance, leaving behind a job at MML Hospitality, which has a lineup of popular Austin restaurants. 

But creating art that grabs the attention of 30 million Texans and the wider U.S. population that chooses Texas brands as their beer or cowboy boot of choice can be a lot of pressure. 

“Maybe 10 percent of the time, I feel like I can’t figure it out and I’m stuck. And that’s when it’s really scary, because you’re like … ‘I can’t just back out of this. You’re launching whatever this thing is in two months it has to be done,’” Wieland said. “But being down to the wire really forces you to come up with some stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t have.” 

Another one of his projects has even become a local meme after East Austin Mexican restaurant De Nada Cantina began serving strong margaritas in an innocent-looking hot pink plastic cup that Wieland designed. 

“Everyone has those pink cups. They’re literally everywhere,” Wieland said. “I’ve seen people with them next to the bathtub to like wash their children.”

He said before De Nada, he had been hoping for a chance to use plastic stadium cups for a project; growing up, his family drank out of cups from the Oasis on Lake Travis, Carlos’n Charlie’s, Rudy’s, and other restaurants.

“To-go cups were things my family served beverages in, and I loved that,” Wieland said. “I wanted to, not necessarily be a part of someone else’s life in that way, but I wanted to be a part of Austin culture in that way where those cups stick around for so long after the last time you went to the Oasis or whatever it is.”

While some might see design work as a trivial aspect of winning customers over, it plays a massively important role in a person’s decision to buy something, and he said that he works with companies that can recognize how critical designs are to their success. 

“I’m not just picky about the people I work with, based on the products they’re selling, or whatever it is. But it’s also the people themselves,” Wieland said. “I like working with … somebody that I could sit down and have a beer with outside of work because it seems like those people are genuinely really grateful for the work that I do and see the value in it.” 

And while he’s worked on projects outside of the state, designing for Lollapalooza Music Festival recently and a growth of Budweiser in Utah, one of his key ambitions is tied to Texas, as he hopes to do branding for the Austin Rodeo or another big city rodeo in the state someday. 

The variety of clients he’s racked up makes every day a little bit different, a habit he’s trying to keep up since he thinks he would get bored if he only went to honky tonks every night of the week. 

“To someone that’s not from Texas, it probably looks like I’m just some cowboy redneck guy. But I think I’ve lived in so many different worlds that … I can jump in and speak the language of a lot of different things,” Wieland said. “I can go do a Lollapalooza thing and turn around and do a Lone Star thing right after it that are completely different worlds.”