Unique blend of architecture and coffee

The Café in Ljubljana’s newest gallery, CUKRARNA, got a new owner that also happens to be one of the architects that designed the CUKRARNA Gallery. The new café is offering the best selection of specialty coffee, craft beer and fine vine. The challenge was to blend the organic coffee aesthetic and feel, with contemporary CUKRARNA architecture, which would connect the identity to the space. We wanted to communicate energy, quality and add a bit of human touch, that honours the people behind coffee production. Rafinerija also relies a lot on event planning, hosting their own concerts, debates, ... thus needing a flexible identity system, that is easy to use.

Rob and I decided to go with a custom typeface that visualises the modular concrete blocks that CUKRARNA is made out of. That would give us a grid, on which we can line up the text or image, making a dynamic, yet clean modernistic composition. Also, the type-based identity would be the easiest to use on the templates. The brand stands out with a chromatic colour, that other competitors don't use. The sustainable, human aspect is translated through drawings and illustration, that counter-balance the modernistic architecture.

The solution is a typeface-made grid system that creates dynamic, yet clean and warm compositions, with the combination of colour and illustrations. The typeface allows the identity to spread as far as we can imagine. We can change colours, illustrations style, compositions, ... and the identity still glues together. The visual system is made in a way that it can grow seamlessly with the changes that happen within the Rafinerija café in the next 5 years. The illustration style connects with the chalkboard in the café and adds authentic, human feel, while making everything more lively and warm. The purple colour pops out nicely on social media and also in reals life, where it balances well with the cold concrete environment. When it comes to promoting events, we just invert the colour palette and use a secondary logo depending on the context.