Angel & Anchor’s identity for Full Circle Coffee Roasters embodies their circular brand ethos

Full Circle Coffee Roasters is a Dublin-based speciality roaster, actively building a sustainable practice and adopting a humanist approach within the coffee industry. The team reached out to Belfast neighbours and branding studio Angel & Anchor to create an identity that leans into their environmentally-conscious ethos and practice, epitomised by their slogan ‘what goes around, comes around.’

As a result, the Belfast studio provided a sleek, modern identity that combines wise messaging and minimalism with pops of vibrant colour. Inspired by the company’s namesake, the identity’s theme is centred around a circle motif. Whilst traditional Swiss design wasn’t an immediate influence, it was used along the way. 

“Our first inspiration was the circle shape,” Creative Director Ben Connolly tells us, describing the project’s starting point. “Full Circle didn’t have a café or a super obvious personality or ’theme’ at the time of exploration,” he adds, noting that there were minimal ‘ingredients’ to work with, besides the name. Combined with a “minimal, Swiss-style”, the brand’s visual language began to take shape. “When we discovered the idea of half-circles forming full ones on the shelf,” Connolly explains, “then everything else fell into place.” This idea also has strong connections to the company’s story, name, and customer experience. “Once that was established as the core direction,” he continues, “it was a case of making everything else make sense.”

The brand’s minimalistic approach, echoing the modesty of its sustainability values, extends to the typographic choices. Looking for a “Helvetica-type feel” without using Helvetica, the team opted for Acumin as their typeface. Providing ease and flexibility in its future applications, it was also a functional choice. “Practically, we needed something that had the potential to work with Squarespace and then Shopify in the future,” Connolly clarifies. This lightweight type is paired with a fine line geometric mark to create the Full Circle logo; incorporating a rectangle reminiscent of a coffee bag interacting with the ubiquitous circles. The brand’s logomark adds a touch of playfulness, as it appears in different arrangements, the shapes shifting and acting like building blocks. 

Whilst the visual language is primarily monochromatic, dominated by a stark white and black pairing, Angel & Anchor introduced energetic pops of colour in the circles, reflective of the company’s various coffee roasts. Adding an upbeat tone to the gentle openness of the brand, the circles are positioned on either side of the bag – allowing for clever display coordination. “The idea of ‘full circles’ being made by stacking bags together whether it was front or back gave us ASMR levels of satisfaction,” he concludes.

Angel & Anchor

Full Circle Coffee Roasters