Category: Brand Language

Packaging

Gourmet Coffee Packaging

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Blend Station

Consider this: The retail coffee market in the U.S. is estimated to be $48 billion annually (NCA). Worldwide 151.3 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee were consumed in 2015-16 (ICO), and gourmet varieties represent more than half of overall consumption. Americans love their caffeine so much that 52% of coffee drinkers say they would rather skip their morning shower than forego their cup of joe (Huffington Post).

Gourmet coffee, by any measure, is big business, and the industry is appealing to budding connoisseurs with new specialty blends and descriptive coffee lingo that rivals that of wine. Some of the latest trends include nitrogen-infused coffee, cold brews, and frozen blends. Millennials see the beverage as a social experience enjoyed with friends in cafes. They take delight in being the first in their crowd to discover new brands. That has made designing eye-catching brand packaging more important than ever.

Here are some coffee brand packages that we like.

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Quizzes

Quiz: What Does Your Brand Sound Like?

By Delphine Hirasuna |

In the age of electronic communications, audio branding has become part of the product experience. An audio logo has to be unique, distinctive, appropriate to the type of product, used consistently so that it becomes familiar over time, and not annoying. It has to be recognizable even without lyrics or saying the brand name aloud. This quiz challenges you to match the visual brand logos with the audio logos that you can listen to in the numbered bands below.

The answers are listed below.

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Naming

Kentucky Derby Violates (Almost) All The Rules of Naming

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Kentucky_Derby

Horse racing fans were on pins-and-needles watching the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs last Saturday, but brand naming experts were probably rolling their eyes and guffawing every time the announcer called out the contenders’ names. The Derby’s naming protocol violates the most basic rules of name development. As anyone in the branding business will tell you, successful names have to be unique, memorable, pronounceable, simple, easy to spell, evocative, and trademark-able. In other words, just the opposite of Triple Crown thoroughbred names.
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Global Trends

Czechia: New Name, Old Country

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Czechia
On the national branding front, the big news is that the Czech Republic has just adopted the shorter, friendlier name Czechia for all but formal occasions. The name change has been under discussion since the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Czechia is not the first nation to limit the use of “Republic” in its name. The Slovak Republic goes by Slovakia, the Federal Republic of Germany goes by just Germany. “Cesko” is what many Czechs call their country, but it didn’t make the cut because people like former Czech president Vaclav Havel said the name made his “flesh creep.” So, Czechia it is. Now it is up to Czech designers to promote the national brand on T-shirts, coffee mugs, soccer jerseys, and all kinds of tcotchke.

Brand Identity

Prague School of Design’s Morphing Identity

By Delphine Hirasuna |

PragueSchoolofDesign02

Moscow-based designer Anna Kulachek has been designing show identities for the Prague School of Design since 2012. Over that time, she has taken her original typographic styling and evolved it into a modular vocabulary of lines and curves that she has morphed into new forms. The breaks in the letterforms suggest that the pieces can be split apart and reassembled into different letters as well as purely decorative lines, half circles and squiggles that look like they are made up of letterform leftovers. The result is a graphic system that retains a consistent look that identifies it with the Prague School of Design, yet changes in surprising and playful ways.

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