This project revolves around the process of creating a brand identity for a fictitious coffee beverage. Project deliverables include a logo, color and font palette, packaging labels, and product mock-ups.

The idea of Homebrew revolved around my distaste for iced coffee beverages that you could buy virtually anywhere from supermarkets and gas stations to the college cafe in my school. Being a coffee lover myself, I was picky about the type of coffee I drank and after tasting several iced coffee brands, I concluded that these beverages depend on creams, sugar, and other flavors so much that they would not be considered coffee in my eyes. That left me with two options: buy hot coffee and prepare it the way I like it or bring my own coffee from home. Realizing the issue at hand, I took the liberty of creating a coffee product for this project among other options. The concept of this beverage aims to bring the purest taste of freshly-brewed coffee without the need of excessive additives like most big-name brands do.

The name Homebrew originates from my preference for hot brewed coffee that I drink at home and I wanted to make this the key point of my product when designing my logos. At first, I wanted to include shapes within the logo text per my usual practice and narrowed it down to an angular roof centered at the ascender of the letter B. The letter H was also stretched upward to line up with the letter B, further insinuating the implied house shape I planned during my sketching phase. Making the header typeface bolder was a subtle change that improved readability.

Once I designed my logo through Illustrator, I began designing the graphics that will go on my mock-ups. Contrasting my disdain for iced coffee brands, I took some inspiration from existing packaging labels to design my relatively simple composition that reflected the idea of Homebrew. I limited myself to using two colors to represent each blend of coffee but later decided to subtly change the logo colors to match the blend, increasing my color palette to four similar colors. Additionally, I included drawn outlined icons to distinguish each roast. Homebrew's initial lineup had three coffee blends: a bold dark roast called The Classic, a sweet medium roast called Vanilla Dream, and a smooth medium roast called Old-Fashioned Hazelnut, but I would later add Caramel Obsession and Traditional Mocha after completing the first three blends with two weeks left to spare.