BRANDING
PACKAGING
ILLUSTRATION
TYPOGRAPHY
Nutmeg’s
BRANDING PACKAGING ILLUSTRATION
Nutmeg’s is a cafe and bakery that aims to create a community in Philadelphia based around the love of artisan bread, fair trade organic brews, and sweet bakes. They believe that good food brings people together. So come on in, grab a sweet snack, and stay a while for goodness bakes!
INSTRUCTOR - JASON KERNEVICH
OBJECTIVE
Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s baking or cooking up strange bubbling concoctions on the stove with different sugars, fruits, and extracts and calling them candies. These fond memories drove me to bake professionally for three years and formed a passion for food that I still carry today. Nutmeg’s is born out of this love of creating unique and exciting flavors and an old dream to open my own bakery one day. My goal was to create a fun and inviting brand for people to experience the joys of baking I felt then and now.
RESEARCH
It felt important that I complete research on the industries of baking and coffee. I didn’t know much about how these businesses operate outside of baking. For some deliverables like the menu and coffee bags, I would need to understand the intricacies of the processes behind them.
Nutmeg’s really started coming to life through the visual inspiration I began to gather. I found that many established cafes and bakeries tend to make fun color choices, use clean, vintage-inspired typography, and use some form of patterning or texture. Using this information, I created a mood board pulling some of these themes and combining them with the mood I thought fit Nutmeg’s. This mood board was adapted and changed a bit more as I explored the logo.
If you’re interested in seeing the full research document, click this link!
LOGO
My first thought when I jumped into the design of the logo was to lean into an artisanal goods vibe. I sketched and fiddled through some retro-inspired serif and sans-serif fonts but ultimately decided that these weren’t fun or playful enough for the name “Nutmeg’s.”
When I started playing around with some more funky 70s-inspired fonts, I felt the vision was beginning to come to life. These had the playful energy I sought, and the wiggly quality reminded me of the pattern when you grate nutmeg. However, these fonts felt a bit illegible, especially when I started to play with the forms to try and create a more exciting shape.
This led me to try and find a happy middle ground between the two: something funky and slightly wiggly while still maintaining legibility and structure. I chose Cooper Nouveau Regular because of its fun, friendly swashes, bulbous serifs, and clean legibility.
PRODUCTS
I knew from the beginning I wanted to create a pattern for my baked goods and packaging paper. It just felt so quintessentially right for a bakery. However, it needed something more freeform than a checkerboard to match the brand's playful nature. So, I returned to the source and drew from the pattern of grated nutmeg.
The coffee bags allowed me the opportunity to explore typographical hierarchy. I felt that to contrast the bright, busy design of the nutmeg pattern; the typography would need to be overall clean and structured to not be too overwhelming. To return that fun and intrigue to the front of the bags, slightly wonky illustrations were created to match the names of the coffee flavors.
The color was important here. I explored a lot of different combinations and ultimately decided to keep it as bright and colorful as possible to keep the brand exciting and playful. I wanted to make sure that all of the colors could be used with each other in exciting ways.
COLLATERAL
Once the Type hierarchy, illustration style, and color palette came together into a system, it allowed me to explore as much collateral as I could dream up to round out the brand and bring it to life. I made a few sketches and initial comps for the packaging and menu, then tweaked things here and there to ensure they fit just right with the brand. When it came to the merchandise, I just drew up whatever I thought would be silly and fun and played with the text in Illustrator. At this point, it was pretty quick moving.
FINAL DESIGNS
FINAL THOUGHTS
This project surpassed what I thought it could be when I started at the beginning of the semester. I had such a wonderful time brainstorming ideas for silly illustrations and puns. I even stepped out of my comfort zone with some aspects of design I haven’t played with as much such as typography, to see how much fun I could have with it and how far I could push it. Ultimately, this is a project I know I will want to keep adding to. There are so many ways I can imagine expanding it.