Project Brief

You will be in charge of repositioning the coffee brand Spirit Mountain Roasting Co. This includes redesigning the existing logo, visual elements, packaging labels, and social media ad. You must keep the cultural elements of the brand in your designs to represent the values of the brand.

Deadline: 7 Days

With any project, especially one that deals with rebranding, I knew that researching the brand would be crucial. Simply just looking at the logo and packaging is not sufficient enough to have a clear direction in the redesign. I developed a PDF slide to record all my research, work and reasonings behind my design choices. I start here with getting to know the brand.

Here we have the original logo of Spirit Mountain Roasting Co. Logo. I will also be in charge of redesigning it.

Next, I took a look at the packaging designs and researched its materials. Knowing that they intentionally designed their packaging to be eco-friendly is necessary, as it represents the brand and what they value as a company. I knew that my packaging design had to honor this choice originally made by Spirit Mountain.

One of my practices as a designer that helps me to rebrand is writing down a list of 10 strengths and 10 weaknesses that I can point out in a design. In this case it’s the logo that we just looked at. I start here with 10 strengths.

And 10 weaknesses

It always helps to develop a mood board. This creates a set of guidelines that your designs should strive towards visually representing.

With the research complete, mood board established and an idea of what I want to keep from the original logo and what I want to change, now comes the process of sketching some ideas for a new logo. I had a spiral notebook handy and got right to work.

I choose three designs from my sketches that I liked the most and rework them in Adobe Illustrator. Here is design number one.

And design number three. This is the design that I ended up choosing as my final. Last step for logo redesign is to refine.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the old logo (left) and the new one that I redesigned (right).

Design number two.

I very subtly increased the size of the typography and transfered the year of establishment to the bottom of “Roasting Co.”. Visual hierarchy is now maximized and strengthens this logo.

Now that the logo is completed, it is time to start pumping out some package designs. Below is a collection of different variations I came up with for a possible package design for Spirit Mountain Roasting Co.

This is the first social media ad that I worked on. A positive I have is that I feel it is brilliant in concept and incorporates a lot of fun visuals. Also, I had a lot of fun designing it. I gave myself critiques and these critiques are the reason why I did not select it as my final piece. A big flaw is that it does not work well as a social media ad. The average person spends as little time looking at advertisements on social media and sometimes it is only a matter of seconds before they scroll on to the next post. There is just too much going on in this concept for it to work on social media. Designs that are a lot simpler in design, consisting of less text and less illustrations would be better suited.

This is my second social media ad concept. What I enjoy about this one is that it stays consistent with the coffee brand it represents such as the Native American figure, the spiritual imagery, and the typography layout and color choices. From time to time I will look at older work and at the time of writing this, it is now a year since I worked on this rebranding project. I would go back and play around with word choice and add some more texture to the mountain illustrations. A bonus idea I have is to have motion graphics applied to this since it would be used for a social media pop-up. Perhaps the shadowy figure emerges from the backside of the mountains and his arm comes up to take a drink from the coffee followed by the birds flying out from the sipper, simulating the hot smoke from the coffee.