Fernhollow Coffee Co. — Brand Identity & Website (Concept)

A self-initiated concept project: a complete identity for an imaginary neighbourhood café and small-batch roastery, from logo to packaging to a homepage for its online bean shop.

Scope: logo, brand guidelines, packaging and website design. Imagery: stock photography.

The brief

Warm in the café, credible on the shelf. The goals were:

• A mark that works from a 16px icon up to a shop sign
• Guidelines a team can follow without a designer
• A homepage that sells beans and brings people into the café

From safe to distinctive

Round one’s badges and labels read as generic café branding, so round two turned the name into small ideas a customer can retell. I explored four routes: a latte fern, a steam fiddlehead, a hedgehog mascot and an unfurling wordmark.

The final mark: Latte Fern

From above, a latte’s rosetta already looks like a fern, so the mark says “café” and “Fernhollow” in one picture. It feels discovered, not invented.

• The cup is tilted 28° so the handle reads at a glance
• A sage saucer gives a solid edge in the leaf colour
• The Fraunces wordmark echoes the cup’s soft curves

Brand system

• Logo suite: six versions, from shop signs down to a 16px browser icon, with a simplified mark below 48px
• Colour: Oat, Espresso, Sage and Caramel. Contrast testing showed cream text on caramel buttons failed accessibility checks, so buttons use espresso text, and two deeper shades are kept for small text
• Type: Fraunces for headings and DM Sans for body text, both free Google Fonts that work on the web, in Canva and in print

Applications and website

The system was tested on five touchpoints: the website header, a kraft bean bag, a takeaway cup, a business card and a social post.

The homepage is built to sell beans and fill seats. Every section ends in a clear action: a hero with “Shop beans” and “Visit the café”, proof points, this week’s roasts, subscriptions, the café with directions, and a newsletter sign-up. It stacks into one column on phones.

Outcome

Six logo files, a brand guide, packaging and print templates, and a homepage ready to build. Fernhollow is an imaginary client, so this piece shows the full process rather than real-world results.