A brand for the neighborhood that helps Nashville sound like Nashville.
- Role
- Strategy & identity design
- Client
- Sound Coffee
- Where
- Berry Hill, Nashville
- Status
- Opened 2020
Summary
Berry Hill is a historic Nashville neighborhood packed with studios and industry offices where a lot of the city’s music gets recorded. The founders of Sound Coffee wanted a cafe that felt like it belonged there, so the name had a lot of work to do.
Before I designed anything, I ran the founders through a strategy workshop. What stuck with me was how much they cared about not being precious. They took the coffee seriously, but they’d watched enough coffee shops make people feel dumb, and they wanted none of that. A first-timer and a coffee obsessive should get the same welcome. That became the guiding light for the identity.
The idea
The strategy came before the mark.
The workshop gave the shop its own words for what it was doing and where it was headed. Everything I designed after that had to answer to these two statements.
- Purpose
- Sound Coffee was born out of a desire to listen, to love, and to serve our community through the tradition of ethically sourced craft coffee.
- The result
- We aspire to offer the most soundly crafted coffee with the hope that we can inspire creativity and thoughtfulness.
The anchor
An identity built from the mark outward.
The mark came first, then the system that extends it across everything a customer touches.
Two sets of sound waves ripple outward and meet in the middle, carrying the S and C. The name earns both meanings at once: sound as in well-made, and the Nashville Sound the neighborhood is in the business of making.
Primary logo
Secondary logos
Brand elements
Patterns
Mockups
