Aster roasts in a converted bakery in Marvila and serves in two small cafés across the river. We gave them an identity as warm as their counters and as precise as their roast profiles.
The brief
The founders were outgrowing a logo made in a weekend. They needed packaging for a rotating list of single-origin coffees, signage for two very different cafés, and a look that wouldn’t date as quickly as the third-wave clichés around them.
Budgets were real and quantities small, so every element had to be printable in short runs.
Approach
The identity is a modular set of shapes drawn from the roaster’s drum — circles, segments and bands — that recombine for every origin. A simple color code describes each roast from light to dark.
Craft
Bags are one-color screen-printed on kraft, with origin details applied by a small label printer in the roastery. In the cafés the same shapes become tiled counters, menu boards and a large mural.
We can design a new bag in an afternoon and it always looks like Aster.
Beatriz Lopes, co-founder
Outcome
Wholesale accounts tripled in the year after launch, and the second café opened with every piece of signage produced in-house from the toolkit.
- Wholesale accounts tripled in twelve months
- New origins packaged in under a day
- Two cafés, one identity, zero bespoke signage