Why Maniac Studio put a cat at the centre of The Pagoda’s identity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

The Pagoda is a riverside café in Chiang Mai, Thailand, across from a historic pagoda. Mexican design agency Maniac Studio was commissioned to redesign its identity, in part in response to a concern founder Pimpawan Laprabang shared with the studio. “Many tourists visited the café alone and often experienced a sense of melancholy, or saw being alone as something negative,”

There was a practical reason, too – the old logo’s thin line made it hard to recognise and use on cups, merchandise and signage. Laprabang asked the studio for “a modern, minimal identity that would feel calm, soulful and creative, and that didn’t rely too heavily on the physical pagoda, so it could grow with us.” The café had been open for about two years when the work began, and it was growing into an art space and a home for lifestyle products. It now runs self-guided painting sessions and sells its own roasted beans, drip coffee bags and canned coffee, and it has since partnered with an airline to serve its coffee on board.

The studio worked with Laprabang from its base in Mérida, Mexico, building its understanding of the café from her brief, photographs and conversations. “We didn’t need to force a cultural connection between Chiang Mai and Mérida,” Domínguez notes. “She was, quite possibly, one of the best clients we have worked with.”

The name had originally been a reference to the café’s proximity to the pagoda, but Maniac Studio chose to treat it as a symbol instead. Beyond religion, the studio sees a pagoda as standing for elevation, stillness and spiritual grounding – a structure that connects earth and sky, rooted yet reaching upward. This thinking gave the brand its central concept, The Pursuit of Balance. At its heart is learning to enjoy one’s own presence.

Maniac Studio put a cat at the centre of the identity as a kind of teacher for The Pursuit of Balance. “Cats embody a sense of independence, self-assurance and calm. They can enjoy their own company, interact with others on their own terms and find comfort in simply being themselves,” Flores explains. “We saw an opportunity to use these qualities to reframe solitude as something positive.”

Maniac Studio drew the cat with smooth, delicate lines, and its poses grew out of characteristic feline behaviours, such as resting, being curious, adapting to different spaces and social situations, and occasionally doing things on its own terms. “We approached the process playfully, experimenting with different poses until the character began to take shape,” Domínguez notes.

To put The Pursuit of Balance into words, the studio wrote five ‘Cat Lessons’ – simple principles for living, inspired by the way cats behave. The first, ‘Enjoy Yourself,’ sees true richness in taking a moment to enjoy your own company. ‘Look with Curiosity’ and ‘Break the Rules’ ask people to notice what usually goes unseen and to defy the rules that limit who they are. ‘Be Coffee, My Friend’ is about adapting to every situation while staying authentic, summed up as ‘Fit the cup, keep the flavour.’ The last, ‘Rest Like It’s Your Job,’ treats time to pause and recharge as a way to build the strength to tackle challenges. The lessons are spread across the identity, with the studio sometimes choosing intuitively which one went where. “This approach helped us avoid monotony and gave the identity more room to breathe,” Flores explains. “The idea was to make discovering these messages feel like a small, unexpected part of the experience.”

In the old logo, the letter ‘A’ echoed both the shape of a pagoda and a traditional Thai greeting. “We decided to preserve that underlying form and reinterpret it as a pointed arch, allowing us to carry an element of the original concept into the new identity,” Domínguez details. The café’s slogan, ‘Nature’s Perfect Blend,’ was already part of the brand, and Laprabang wanted to keep it. The new logo is an emblem that sets the name and slogan inside that pointed arch. For Laprabang, the reshaped ‘A’ “feels fresh and modern but still keeps the touch of the original.” To give the slogan a stronger presence, Maniac Studio created an illustration of stacked cups that features it, with the cups sitting on the cat’s head in one of its many poses.

For the typography, the studio paired Displaay’s geometric sans serif Avantt with Lineto’s serif LL Bradford, which “feels neutral at first glance, yet has plenty of personality.” Together, the two typefaces “create a balance between maturity and playfulness.” The palette of grey, white and black is kept from the café’s existing identity – a restrained palette the studio sees as suiting the “spirituality, serenity and neutrality” of The Pagoda’s name.

The identity is now used across the café’s cups, menus, window, packaging, merchandise and signage. Laprabang tells us that many of the café’s guests “notice the small details and take photos in front of our window, which has become the café’s favourite photo spot.” Guests often describe the brand as “calm and thoughtful, just like the space itself.”

“At Maniac, we believe a brand needs a solid concept, and that the visual elements should make sense within that framework. But we don’t believe every single decision needs to be justified down to the smallest detail. Sometimes, something simply looks good, works well graphically or brings a sense of fun and memorability to the identity,” the studio concludes.