BLCKEST Coffee Roasters

Agency: Holloka Graphic Design Studio
Graphic designers: Réka Holló-Szabó and Gergő Molnár
Product visualization: Bence Sandor
Location: Hungary
Project Type: Produced
Client: BLCKEST Coffee Roasters
Product Launch Location: Hungary
Packaging Contents: Coffee
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Cardboard, paper
Printing Process: Digital Printing

BLCKEST Coffee Roasters is a small roastery experimenting with playful flavours in Budapest, Hungary. Their wide array of beans are from all over the world in order to satisfy their customers of speciality coffee. The main goal for the packaging redesign was to elevate the brand to a premium feel by the packaging design and to create a modular packaging identity which can be easily extended by the roasteries continuously growing collection of speciality beans.

When creating the design, we aimed for packaging that catches the eye with its unique form on the shelves. The boxes lined up next to each other create a peculiar tooth-like rhythm with their specific diagonal shaped upper part, creating unity.

The brand caters to a wide variety of customers with more than 15 types of coffee beans and respects the tradition of roasting but always innovating on better and new flavours. We aimed to show this duality on the packaging as well. The areas on the packaging are separated to two parts: the backgrounds monochrome surface and the use of antiqua typeface stands for the brands traditional values and contains the invariable graphic elements such as the logo, type of roast, the weight and the social contacts. The colored area runs around the box like a ribbon reflecting on the diagonal shape of the box creating an exciting trapeze and adding to the visual rhythm when put next to each other. The colored area around the packaging with its dynamic color palette and the use of grotesk typefaces visualizes the brand’s modern and playful curiosity and gives place to the graphic elements that change with the type of beans it contains.

The color palette uses three types of shade that reflect whether its roasted light, mild or dark and every type of coffee bean uses a different color which represents the visual mood of the country of origin and in many cases inspired by each country’s flag.

With more than 15 types of coffee beans BLCKEST uses sub-categories according to the roast types and it differentiates their flavoured, blend and decaffeinated beans. For this reason we added a group of carefully designed lines representing the separate coffee groups and designed them in a way that the waves reflect the type of roast they got.

As BLCKEST imports the raw beans from many countries, we found it important to represent the variety of countries on the packaging and came up with an abstract form of each country on a grid made from coffee bean shapes.