We recently completed a brand identity project for a new company selling high quality coffees and brewing equipment.

The Hessian Coffee Company is a new business venture started by one of our long-term clients to sell high quality coffee making equipment to consumers through an online shop, and high quality coffee through an online coffee club. Fuelled by the popularity of the large coffee chains and independent coffee shops on the high street, the market for interesting high quality coffees to drink at home is growing rapidly. The brief was for two brands, each with a distinct personality, but recognisable as part of the same family. ‘The Hessian Coffee Company’ is the main business, selling the hardware, with ‘Bean Delivered’ supplying coffee to members of the coffee club. The key selling points of both brands is quality, competitively priced, ethical products – targeted at individuals already know what they want, or who appreciate quality and are willing to be educated in the preparation and enjoyment of fine coffee at home. We’ve worked with this client on several other projects and they know the value of research when creating a new brand. Assessing your competitors’ brands, looking for common elements and themes is really important as a starting point. It allows you to make informed decisions about when to be different and when to use common design language that your customers associate with the product you’re selling. At the same time as the brand research, we gathered together a range of images that seemed to have the right look and feel. The resulting mood board was extremely useful in creating graphic ideas for the logos as well as generating potential colour palettes for the brand. The image research sparked off several ideas for initial logo designs for the two brand identities. Which after detailed discussion with the client lead to a definite direction in terms of the imagery and personality that we were trying to achieve – slightly quirky and playful for the coffee club, and slightly more corporate for the main company Referring back to the mood board led to a change of colour and some final development before finalising the two logo designs. In keeping with the slightly playful personality of the Bean Delivered brand, the website design that followed made use of parallax scrolling and several other CSS3 and JQuery scripts to create an interesting user experience in-keeping with the high quality and unusual coffees on offer.