A brand rooted in the ritual

Fieldwork began as a conversation about what specialty coffee feels like before it becomes precious. The founders wanted warmth over austerity — a brand you'd find pinned to a warehouse wall, not framed in a gallery.

The identity draws from mid-century cartographic illustration: concentric survey rings, a palette of burnt sienna and dark roast brown, and a wordmark set in a modified Garamond italic that reads as both elegant and worn.

The system needed to scale from espresso cups to 20kg sacks — every application tested at both extremes before anything was approved.

Packaging as provenance map

Each origin gets its own colour field — the Ethiopia bag in near-black, Colombia in the signature sienna, Guatemala in a deep roast brown. The label is a constant: same grid, same typographic hierarchy, different story.

The colour-as-origin system means a customer who becomes fluent in one bag can instantly read the shelf. It also photographs cleanly in the flat-lay content that fills the brand's social presence.

All bags were printed offset in a single Pantone run per colour, keeping unit costs manageable for a roaster that was still small when we started working together.

The full system in miniature

The stationery suite exists to prove a brand can hold at every scale. The letterhead uses wide leading and restrained type — the kind of document that feels worth keeping. The business card goes to dark ground, same as the retail bags, maintaining the hierarchy established in the packaging work.

The takeaway cup was a late addition — the client had been using a generic kraft sleeve — and the branded version became one of the strongest touchpoints in the café environment.

Soft authority

Lune wanted to occupy the space between clinical and mystical — skincare that knows its chemistry but doesn't make you feel like you're reading a textbook. The brand needed gravitas without austerity.

The crescent mark is drawn from a simple geometric subtraction — one circle occulting another — which gives it a precision that handmade moon marks often lack. Set against the wide-spaced, all-caps wordmark, the combination reads as both modern and timeless.

Two materials, one system

The packaging alternates between obsidian glass (for the serums and oils) and a matte stone-finish polymer (for the creams and balms). This material distinction maps directly to product texture — the system teaches itself without needing a legend.

Label typography is set entirely in a small-caps Garamond at a point size most clients would consider dangerously small. It works because the labels are always experienced up close, in hand — not at shelf distance.

Long-form design for long-form reading

Meridian is a quarterly journal about place, travel, and culture — the kind of publication that sits on a coffee table for months. The design system needed to be rigorous enough to guide an in-house production team across issues, but flexible enough to respond to each issue's specific territory.

The underlying grid uses a five-column structure that allows for full bleeds, narrow text columns (for dispatches and short pieces), and the wide caption margins the photography editor was insistent on.

Cover art is commissioned per issue — the typographic frame is fixed. The masthead in italicised Garamond has remained unchanged since issue one.

The spread as a unit of composition

Every feature in Meridian is designed as a series of spreads, never as individual pages. The full-bleed image on the right page of the opening spread sets the tonal register for everything that follows; the drop cap on the left grounds the reader before the text pulls them in.

The editorial team contributes running notes on each article — fragments of reported detail, images, pull quotes — which get woven into the margins and captions. It's a design that rewards slow reading.

Numbers made legible, not loud

The Atlas Foundation funds environmental research and land conservation across Central Europe. Their annual report is a public document — distributed to donors, policy-makers, and press — and it needed to carry the weight of evidence while remaining genuinely readable.

The data visualisations were built in close collaboration with the foundation's research team, prioritising clarity over decoration. Every chart was designed twice: once for the printed book, once as a standalone asset for digital distribution.

A movement app that doesn't look like one

Forma is a fitness and mobility tracking app aimed at people who've burned out on the high-energy aesthetic that dominates the category. The brief was essentially: make it feel like it belongs next to Meridian and Lune on the shelf, not next to a protein supplement.

The product identity uses the same typographic system as the brand — Garamond italic for headings, DM Mono for data and labels — creating coherence between marketing surfaces and the product itself.

The colour language is minimal: near-black ground, one red for actions and progress, muted tones for secondary information. The progress ring is the only moment of decoration in the core flow; it earns its place by being genuinely functional.

A system the team can maintain

The Forma design system was documented in Figma across eight component families. The brief included handing off to an in-house product team who would continue development without an external design partner — which meant every decision needed a rationale, not just a spec.

Token naming follows a two-tier structure: primitive tokens (raw colour values) sit beneath semantic tokens (surface/background, on-background, interactive, etc.). This insulates the design from future brand updates — changing the accent colour requires editing one primitive token, not hunting through hundreds of component overrides.