Death Wish Coffee + Reyna Rivera
Artist Brand Collaboration
A packaging design campaign fusing the artwork of surrealistic illustrator Reyna Rivera with the Death Wish Coffee brand.
Initiation
I started the project facing a few obstacles: namely the challenges of doing a brand collaboration project remotely, without the luxury of in-person sit-downs and discovery sessions. With my limited time and resources, I started to mull over a few artists that I knew would be interested in a collaboration. The list covered a few fine artists, cartoonists, muralists, tattoo artists, etc. I ultimately reached out to Reyna because, of all the artists that I was considering, her work seemed to have the strongest voice, the most consistent visual aesthetics: her work was macabre, but often, in a strange way, empowering and approachable. It was an embracement of weirdness.
Choosing a Brand
From the start, I had an inclination to create something with a classic feel. One of the interesting things about Reyna's work is that her ink medium and high-contrast style lended themselves to a classic illustrative aesthetic, but her subject matter is often contemporary... abstract and surreal.
I initially started in the wine market, wondering how I might be able to leverage the organic imagery of Reyna's work to appeal to a niche portion of that market. Ultimately, however, I found that the audience was too weak; when wine brands venture into contemporary aesthetics, they take the route of minimalism, not bizarre surrealism. So, I explored a few other product markets, such as whiskey, gin, bourbon, etc., creating moodboards to assess how these brands might work together with Reyna's artwork.
Ultimately I settled on Death Wish coffee, as this particular brand had the bold bizarreness that I was looking for in an appropriate pairing. Generally speaking, the Death Wish brand is fairly simple; the imagery is black and white, high contrast, and most of their products feature a simple skull and crossbones (the company logo).
The thing that really made this brand a nice paring for Reyna's work, however, was the philosophy of Death Wish. The company is known for having the "strongest coffee in the world". Their messaging, their tone, their imagery, all of it has a macabre appeal of empowerment to a classically "misfit" archetype; artists, musicians, 80s nerds, sci-fi enthusiasts... the surface of the brand is morose, but the underlying messaging is one of good intention and personal wellness.
So, I crafted a new moodboard specific to the Death Wish coffee and Reyna Rivera brand fusion, paying attention not only to illustrative styles but to audience and environments as well.
Creating the Touchpoints
I started crafting the primary touchpoint as a mockup of two coffee bags, two of a series that would (in concept) utilize a wide range of Reyna's artwork, utilizing different characters and themes to correlate to the refinement of the coffee inside each bag.
I secured digital scans of three prints from Reyna and brought them into photoshop for touch-up work. I selected the two illustrations with the most natural, organic subject matter, falling in line with the organic voice of Death Wish's product.
Applying these illustrations to the coffee bag mockups was a fairly seamless process of image manipulation. The body copy of the bags follows the simple sanserif typography of the Death Wish brand. However, I added custom typography to the headers of these products, each coinciding with the individual subbrand and visuals of each product (coarse coffee grounds vs. refined grounds in this case).
Following the typography sketches, I worked the final typeface into Adobe Illustrator and applied it to the designed mockups in conjunction with Reyna's artwork.
