Jamhot’s striking identity for Glasgow-based roasters Hokum is nonsensically serious about coffee 

Glasgow-based design agency Jamhot have stayed local in their identity, naming and brand strategy for their Glaswegian neighbour and coffee roasters Hokum. With the tagline ‘Change Your State’, Hokum hopes to take a serious but totally nonsensical attitude when it comes to everything to do with coffee.

Craig Laverty, Creative Director at Jamhot, explains that the tagline is inspired by the known characteristics of coffee, telling us “‘Change Your State’ is a rallying cry to makers and creators, people who are tired of the status quo and who want to mix it up.” To this end, Jamhot also wanted to “do something that little bit different” in their design for Hokum, in a saturated market of well-designed coffee brands; aiming to define a brand rife with personality which “could easily be extended as the company grows.”

With an intensely bold and striking design maintaining a simple formula of audacious typography and brazen illustration, it’s safe to say Jamhot has achieved this, with the help of illustrator Dave Marrow at Boxdog Inc in crafting the incredibly intricate and equally ludicrous drawings. Laverty tells us that with the product name as a starting point, “the illustrations were conceived to convey a little bit of nonsense,” leading to a comic book style branding that is rarely seen in the realm of product design. “We wanted to create a premium brand that felt unconventional and experimental in terms of style and positioning within the speciality coffee market,” Laverty adds, crafting a balance through typography and illustration that has resulted in an elevated and premium feel, but stripped of all pretension.

This lighthearted approach, which relishes in joyous absurdity, is contrasted with Jamhot’s typographic choice; using the brutalist sans serif Bureau Grot as the display typeface and logomark. This is paired with Fran, an elegant and functional slab serif which is used for secondary information and delicate illustrative copy.

“The brand was developed with the long term in mind,” Laverty clarifies, “with the ability for additional colours and illustrations to be added as the range grows.” Excited for what the future holds, with the roastery to launch in 2021, Laverty tells us that “the fun part will be seeing how this develops and what new aspects can be added and how far we can push the ideas and execution.”

Jamhot

Hokum