Garland Coffee Co
A modern coffee brand shaped by vintage American advertising.
Garland Coffee Co. needed a brand identity that would stand out in a crowded market of artisan cafés. They wanted something that felt classic and timeless, while still approachable for a modern coffee audience.
CASE STUDY: GARLAND COFFEE CO.
SERVICE: BRANDING & WEB DESIGN
YEAR: 2024
Speculative project — brand concept and identity system.
Approach
The starting point was a simple observation: the artisan coffee market is saturated with the same visual vocabulary — kraft paper, hand-lettered scripts, muted earth tones. Every brand is trying to signal authenticity the same way.
I wanted to explore a different direction. What if authenticity came from a different era entirely — the golden age of American commercial art, when designers like Lester Beall and the Streamline Moderne movement were making bold, geometric, typographically-driven work that felt both modern and distinctly American?
I gave myself a brief: build a coffee brand with the visual confidence of mid-century advertising — bold type, high-contrast color, clean geometry — but make it feel like it belongs in 2024, not 1948.
Solution
The Garland Coffee Co. identity is built around typography as the primary brand element — a custom-influenced logotype drawn from Streamline Moderne aesthetics, paired with a color system that references mid-century hues without feeling like a costume.
Every application was designed to test the system at scale: packaging, signage, tote bags, web, and environmental mockups. The goal was to prove the concept held up across touchpoints — that it was a real brand system, not just a logo exercise.
The result is a brand that feels immediately distinctive in a crowded category — familiar enough to be approachable, specific enough to be memorable.
What I learned
Self-initiated projects are where I find out what I actually believe about design. This one confirmed something I've always suspected: the most distinctive brands aren't the ones that follow category conventions — they're the ones that borrow intelligently from somewhere else entirely.
Mid-century American commercial art is an underused reference point in food and beverage branding. Garland Coffee Co. is my argument for why that should change.
