Blue Bear Cafe
A brand identity and packaging concept for a neighbourhood café built around a bear with just enough attitude to keep things friendly without getting cute.
Services:
Strategy, Identity, Packaging, Art Direction
Industry:
Hospitality & Coffee
Timeline
3 Weeks
The Challenge
Finding what was already there.
Café branding can become very predictable quickly, there is a cafe on almost every street corner and they all look… like a café.
My job is not creating a personality for a brand but rather finding what makes the café different.
So the question was: what is it that makes someone choose Blue Bear when there are other cafés down the road?
With some research I found that Blue bear had a strong local following, a great name and its own way of doing things. People came back because they liked the experience, the coffee, the atmosphere and the feeling of the place.
Rather than deciding what I thought the brand should look like, I looked at what was already making the café special and worked backwards from there. The aim was to find the visual identity that felt like it had been hiding inside Blue Bear all along.
The Result
The bear became a big part of that.
I didn't want to turn it into a cute café mascot because that wasn't what made Blue Bear interesting, there was more personality there than that. So I gave the bear a restrained expression and a little attitude, enough to make it memorable without making it the whole show.
From there, the rest of the identity was built around the same balance.
Typography, colour and layout give the brand enough restraint to feel considered and confident, while the bear brings the warmth and personality that makes it feel like Blue Bear rather than another café.
The result is a brand that makes the things people already like about Blue Bear easier to recognise and remember.
That's what I want branding to do. Not invent a business that looks good from the outside, but understand what is already working, find the idea underneath it and give the business a way to show people why they should choose it.
