Future Classic Coffee Branding

With so many different artisanal coffees on the shelves, Brian and Amelia set out to create a new brand of coffee that would emphasize the hyper seasonality of its beans and educate their audience on its origins, much like wine culture does with grape harvests.

We collaborated closely to create an identity and packaging design that would represent both the modern millennial coffee drinker and the duality in its namesake: contemporary and fun, but also refined and sophisticated. 

Logo Development: 
During our initial meeting, the founders presented a brief and inspiration board full of mid-century modern references. For the logo, they wanted to explore two different directions: logomark options that would evoke a sophisticated MCM design and work options that could incorporate simple iconography to represent the seasonality of its beans.

For the second round, the feedback was to explore more decorative logos and show how they could depict seasonality.

Ultimately, we landed on a modern logo with a funky typeface that could be used as an abstract pattern, graphic, and framing device in the expanded brand identity. However, to keep the MCM aesthetic, we chose a classic color palette to ground the brand. The seasonality, thought an important part of the brand story, would not be depicted in the logo, but in the bag label instead.

Coffee Bag Development:
As a CPG brand, Future Classic Coffee's packaging design would be its biggest brand touchpoint and needed to stand out amongst its competitors on the shelves. For inspiration, we conducted visual research from numerous competitors and those in adjacent industries like tea and chocolate. As a small start-up brand, we decided to limit ourselves to one bag design across flavors and differentiate them by their labels. FCC would start off with two evergreen flavors with more traditional label designs, while the third rotating flavor would feature a modern design that would change according to the season. Below are a selection of bag & label design options.

Of all the bag designs, the clients loved the idea of using the bold typographic pattern on the bags. Ultimately, we realized the label designs would be too large to affix to the bags accurately by hand, so we needed to print the logo onto the bags and pare down the information on the labels for a simple, minimalistic label design that would contrast well with the bag's impactful pattern.