The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
CORE COFFEE sorts its beans by where they grew, arranged by colour and a single numeral. Every stylised number is drawn loosely, quickly, and intended to be readable at a glance. The concept and packaging come from taoSTUDIO, a Shanghai-based design studio, whose brief was to keep the beans, not the branding, in the foreground. So the CORE COFFEE logotype sits in small, plain type at the top of every pack, given equal footing with the bean information rather than dominating it. “I believe sometimes smallness carries greater power,” Founder Zhangtao tells us, having kept the mark small enough “to read as simply as a single word.” Separated from the bean data by nothing more than its position in the layout, the logo holds its own without needing to raise its voice – “even at a smaller scale, the logo does not lose its visual impact,” Zhangtao adds.
The numerals, however, began as something far more offhand. “These custom numerals draw inspiration from casual mouse-drawing gestures in daily work,” Zhangtao explains, having first scribbled rough numbers with the mouse simply to label and distinguish bean cards on screen. Some of those freehand lines turned out to be worth keeping. “I stumbled upon some attractive freehand lines in the process and refined them repeatedly,” the founder continues, adjusting and rebalancing the set until the numbers looked like a family, judged largely by eye.
Each colour is drawn from the flavour profile of the bean it represents. “The exact colour values were finalised intuitively through constant trial-and-error colour matching; there was no rigid formula behind the choices,” Zhangtao reveals. Under them all sits a soft grey base, chosen as a unified material tone that keeps the focus on the bean information. “Soft grey acts as a neutral balancing backdrop across the full packaging range,” the founder notes, letting the colours stand out clearly against it.
The typography is split between warmth and precision. Origin names are set in HvD Fonts’ Brandon Grotesque, a warm geometric sans that feels close to Futura but with more rounded terminals. “It brings warmth to its geometric structure, which I find perfect for this brand,” Zhangtao explains. The smaller supporting text takes René Bieder’s typewriter-style Rational TW Display, a neat monospace that, in Zhangtao’s words, “echoes the precise, meticulous craft of coffee roasting and creates clear contrast against the main heading font.”
That system stretches across three formats, each pitched at a different drinker. The 250g pouch is the standard daily-consumption size for regular coffee drinkers; the 100g carton is built for drip coffee bags; and the 80g metal tin is held back for premium, limited-edition speciality beans. Rather than redraw the graphics for paper, board and metal in turn, taoSTUDIO applied the coloured numerals as identical stickers of the same material and dimensions across every pack, which kept production simple and, as Zhangtao concludes, meant “all colours stayed well within printable production ranges.”