F61’s bright and bold identity for Habit imagines a world where coffee is its saviour

Located in the Russian capital city of Moscow, Habit is a craft coffee brand and shop with a singular and bold aspiration: to treat each cup of coffee not just as a drink prepared by the skilful hands of a barista, but as an emotion that sets the tone for the entirety of the day ahead. St. Petersburg-based independent design agency F61 were commissioned to devise Habit’s visual identity, packaging and communications; for which they positioned the brand’s ‘larger than coffee’ philosophy at the forefront of their energetic solution.

The undoubted centrepiece of F61’s bright, bold and welcoming work is the wordmark, which unapologetically governs the spaces it finds itself placed in with character and vigour. “We love quirky typography with taste. In this case, it’s the taste of coffee (haha),” F61 co-founder Lana Lomakina lightheartedly tells us. Finding itself on everything from menus to takeaway cups, the wordmark is accompanied by the slogan ‘MORE THAN COFFEE.’ The pairing works together effortlessly despite the seemingly reversed hierarchy at play with the slogan being consistently typeset in uppercase.

Pastel pink and royal blue dominate the colour palette, although they rarely appear together with black and white alternating as pairing colours. “We live in a city where for eight months of the year only shades of grey are around, so we chose pink and blue as bright impulses of joy, that, we hope, will turn into a good habit,” Komakina explains.

Primarily appearing on take-home coffee bean packaging, the final piece of Habit’s visual identity puzzle is a series of illustrations which Komakina describes as “absurd,” “ironic” and “with a common idea.” Created in-house, the intentionally nonsensical drawings imagine a world within which a cup of coffee is the temporary saviour to every problem. “Flood, zombie apocalypse? Okay, but first coffee. A habit is a habit,” concludes Komakina.

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F61