Small Business Branding + Illustration Design: Redesigning my Favorite Neighborhood Cafe Part 2

I’m an illustrator/ brand designer and my branding studio specializes in small business branding. So when I’m picking up my coffee, I often find myself sort of critiquing the spaces and branding around me. And don’t get me wrong, it’s usually not bad but, I also almost always see something I think could be improved with some illustration design.

Almost every weekend I carve out some time to go sketching in one or two of my favorite coffee shops. This started a year or two ago with this cafe in my neighborhood called Coffee Daze because at the time it was the only place that I could walk to. Over time I’ve really grown to love this place. I meet people there all the time, they’ve got a wonderful community in their loyal customer base, I love my regular order of London Fog tea and the owner is an amazing person, who’s doing everything she can to make her business as great as possible. But I always felt like the atmosphere and the branding in the place was just kind of a blank slate.

Coffee Daze also has pretty bland, non-existent branding. They sell some merch but don't really have a logo, it's just black block text on all their stuff and on their sign. I can tell they spent some effort picking out a nice font but it doesn’t really stand out or catch the eye on the street or lend itself to creating a lot of customer excitement.  

The good news is I’ve seen a little illustration design fix (or at least improve) this problem super fast! So I thought I’d give it a try!  

Last time I decided to see if I could liven up the interior, this time I wanted to see if I could help out with their logo and maybe some signage. I mentioned before that Coffee Daze has a very loyal customer base and I’ve got to believe people would probably spend some money on merch from their favorite coffee shop if they had some art to interact with, so I wanted to play a little with that too. 

I don’t even think we need that much illustration to go a long way toward making all these problems disappear, so I decided to see how far I could get with a single multipurpose illustration. 

Like before I wanted to keep in line with the vibe the place already has, so I stuck with the color palette of light oranges, yellow and pinks I’ve seen them use before. I also really wanted to run with the concept of ‘daze’ and out of the couple ideas I had, I felt this fit best because it kind of just had the same feel as the community I see at the coffee shop.

So let's see how far it will go!

And now add in the previous work!

What do you think, how’d it go? Did I improve the branding?

And think if this is what one fast illustration can do, how much more could a full rebrand accomplish?

If you want more on what a good logo can do check out this great article: https://www.tailorbrands.com/logo-maker/why-a-logo-is-important

If you’re interested in something similar for your business you can see some of my merch art experience on my projects page: https://www.kamillaillustration.com/illustration-design-projects

Or check out my process for small business branding here:  https://www.kamillaillustration.com/small-business-branding

If you're wondering what a similar process might look like for your small business contact me here!

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