Manhattan, Cosmopolitan

Part of me just wants a decent cocktail sometimes. Something sweet, properly made. Not the cheap stuff you’d force down at a dive bar, but something that tastes like the person pouring it knew what they were doing. Formulas that have held up for fifty years because they work.

Nick Barclay, based in Sydney, made a series of minimalist prints of classic cocktails—Manhattan, Cosmopolitan, Bloody Mary. Each one stripped to its essential shape. No garnish illustrations, no flourish, just the lines of the drink itself.

I respect the approach. These cocktails have real history, and treating them seriously through minimal design is genuine respect, not irony. They don’t need explaining. Just the image.

There’s something in his design that mirrors what makes these drinks work in the first place. They’re not complicated formulas—they’re simple enough that they’ve stayed unchanged for decades, and that’s exactly why they became classics. It takes repetition and consistency to turn something into tradition, and his prints seem to understand that weight. He’s not being clever about the subject. Just clear.