BeanBlock

Working with ambitious local businesswomen, Aliki Allen and Cate Martin, to help them realise their shared vision of opening a community focused café in Newark by creating the logo, brand style and promotional materials for BeanBlock.

Creative Process

Beginning this project with a very strong sense of what they wanted to achieve, made translating Cate and Aliki’s vision into reality an absolute pleasure. With the colour scheme already chosen, they both envisaged a wordmark style logo but we recommended combining that with a unique icon of some kind that could be used to more easily identify them on social media. Taking all these things into consideration, it remained for us to develop a few initial concepts.

Of the three concepts presented, there was an immediate front-runner in Concept 1. It delivered on the brief perfectly with the uniquely identifying “block icon” being an integral part of the simple and understated wordmark, but there was a mutual feeling that Concept 3 also had potential and should therefore be explored further.

Developing Concept 3 further created a nice little logo that visually described the café name perfectly, it was a coffee bean within a block that resembled the initial letter B. What could be more perfect than than that? Yet, it didn’t have the simplicity and strength of Concept 1.

After some time to consider the options and further discussions between Cate, Aliki and ourselves, it was concluded that they wanted to go with their initial instincts and chose Concept 1 as their preferred logo.

Brand Development

Following the completion of the logo design part of the project, we were asked to create a branded banner to display in the cafe window while the space was being developed. This included all the newly created brand elements, including the BeanBlock wordmark, the logomark (block icon) and the distinctive brand colours. It also incorporated some lovely images created by students at Newark College, featuring Aliki and Cate's children as the happy and playful little customers, which made a for a wonderful personal touch.

Once the café was open, we were asked to design some customer loyalty cards, for which we created a unique design for both the children and the grown-ups version.

We have also created a series of social media assets to help promote their “Pay It Forward” campaign, which supports local families by providing free meals kindly donated by café customers and local businesses.

Since our very first chat at the Newark Business Club, we knew that Cate and Aliki would absolutely make this happen. We have been more than happy to support them in whichever way we could, and will continue to do so knowing that BeanBlock is such a wonderful community project doing great things for the families of Newark… as well as providing us with yummy cakes and coffee!.