Coffee meets design Brand identity // Packaging, merchandise, retail space // Creative direction // Illustration // Typography
BUNCA: Where coffee culture meets high-end design
What Bunca [Bu’n ka] means: “Here you go, your coffee.”
BUNCA is a cafe with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and branches in other German cities as well as Dubai.
Context
BUNCA is a specialty coffee shop where the quality of the product is matched by the aesthetic of the environment.
Challenge
In a crowded hospitality market, BUNCA needed a brand identity that felt artisanal and personal, yet sophisticated enough to stand out as a "design-led" destination.
With a brand name that has such a warm and yet sassy personality, it’s important to find a design style that also shows a spectrum of character—playful, colourful, eye-catching, but also intense, easy to process, and a storytelling of the products.
Strategy
Coffee meets design: The strategy was to use custom illustration and meticulous typography to create a sensory brand experience that extended from the coffee cup to the retail space. I went with angular, geometric shapes and mixed them with soft, flowing, organic illustrations…a lot of trials. The result is a visually distinct and standout brand identity for coffee. It reflects their brand principles: “love, peace, and damn good coffee.”
What I did
As their designer (project-based), handling everything from the logo and brand identity to packaging and merch design fell on me. I also created the design of the retail space, merchandise, packaging, social media assets, and made custom illustrations to define the brand's unique voice.
Outcome
A highly Instagrammable, cohesive brand presence that successfully launched BUNCA as a local design landmark in the coffee community.
Each coffee has a corresponding animal based on their flavour – from intense and dark, to mild and sweet. The base packaging have slight differences—the regular product line are solid black (to also cut on production costs) and seasonal products have silver or gold floral embossing on the bags.
I learned quite a bit about coffee and food packaging requirements through this project. For example,
I learned that some of the geometric designs did not fit the curvature of the bags and cups well,
or that some angles needs to be adjusted to accommodate the softness of packaging materials, and certain colours combinations worked better on gloss versus and matte.
Initially, I wanted to blend more organic and lighter imagery with solid geometric shapes and to try different styles, from watercolour-like to raw sketches, and solid blocks. In the end, the final geometric style shows a contrast of the sharpness (or to some tastebuds, the bitterness) of drinking coffee, while the curved lines of the plants show the softer stories of the beans. All in all, the final results were very loved by the client.
Tags: Creative direction // Art direction // Brand design // Experience design // Packaging, merchandise, retail, interior design // Illustration // Photography
