Your client owns a local coffee shop in Toronto. They are a new start-up company, so they don’t have any branding materials or a website. They require a brand identity in addition to an app that their customers can use to purchase coffee and track their coffee purchases.
For this branding assignment, I was challenged to rebrand a coffee shop that had recently started in the market but was struggling to expand their business and bring in a diverse demographic of customers. A brand refresh is a great way to reinvent a business and achieve development success from a short-term perspective.
As this was supposed to be a startup coffee shop that would be catering to a very diverse but knowledgeable client base, the main competitors were, unsurprisingly, Second Cup Coffee Company and Starbucks; both these companies are popular among the diverse and knowledgeable client demographic.
A persona, in user-centered design and marketing, is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. For this project, I came up with 2 distinctive personas, 'Jack Finnigan' and 'Brooke Cagle'. Both personas have their own personality traits, frustrations, and a section dedicated to services and features that they value in a business.
TheMmoodboards for this assignment were entirely based on a colour palette that would bring out the mood of the brand. The first one has a clean and more minimalistic feel to it, while the second one brings the outdoors in by making use of warm and earthy tones.
The final prototype is a modern-looking application that welcomes the user with a splash screen and offers a handful of functionalities such as online ordering, merchandise shopping, and a loyalty card tracker for users that have an account with the brand. In addition, users can opt to use the app without an account by simply clicking on ‘continue as guest’. The logo was entirely designed on Adobe Illustrator, and it is clean, elegant and readable on different surfaces, such as merchandise cups, candles, and coffee bags that would likely be sold by the brand on their website and app.
