Café Būho: Package Illustration & Branding by Futura

WRITTEN BY: Roger McDonald

Café Būho: Creating a Visual Personality

A company’s identity is the driving force behind their success. Visual consistency and recognizability are of utmost importance in all marketing campaigns, including package illustration and other branding materials. Therefore, the company’s brand needs to have a personality.

Instantly-identifiability and uniqueness are hard to balance in branding, but Mexico-based design studio Futura had a vision for Café Būho. Given that the coffee shop finds it’s home in Chile, Futura decided to draw inspiration from the Chilean muralist movement. Local urban street art and Costumbrista art make up the style and influence behind this branding re-interpretation.

The bright color palette attracts the eye. The simple geometric shapes and thick lines make for visually pleasing designs. However, the details in the street-art-style package illustration hold the viewer’s attention. These colors and shapes fall in line with modern pop art trends, keeping it relevant to new markets. However, the “nu-retro” style gives the branding a timeless quality.

This juxtaposition of age-old styles and the modern world also shows up in the package illustration designs themselves. While somewhat abstract, many of these illustrations show the “the farmer who sows and harvests, as well as all those involved.” The package illustration attempts to represent every step of the coffee making process, all the way to the “customer who drinks a cup of coffee.”

Package Illustration & Branding Identity Done Right

Modern branding trends tend to focus on the company’s mark: The non-text icon hoping to be universally recognizable with its respective brand. What makes this project stand out is the focus on a simple, bold typographic logo. The mark, a night owl sipping a steaming cup of late-night coffee, elegantly sits atop a ribbon on various packaging designs. However, it is not featured on several of the branding materials and is not the central focus. The mark sets out to be a tasteful accent to well-developed illustrations and simple-yet-impactful typography.

The package illustrations draw you in and keep you interested enough to learn the name.  As Futura puts it, Café Būho is “a coffee shop with a different approach.” Therefore, Futura’s approach involved creating a “different, original and disruptive brand that captivates the consumer.”

Let’s take a closer look at the outstanding package illustration and branding identity created by Futura:

 

ARTIST BIO: Born in 2008 as an Independent Design Studio, Futura is a boutique-like workshop that seeks to redefine the Mexican design values, maintaining functionality, wit and charisma. We specialize in resource optimization paying attention to every detail. Nowadays our HQ is based in Mexico, but we have clients all over the world.

 

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