Olssøn Barbieri give coffee a voice across their meticulously philosophical brand for Stereoscope

“The black is a nod to the colour of their previous bags, but we needed to expand the palette to create a navigation system for the different types of roasts,” Olssøn Barbieri’s Founder & Managing Director Henrik Olssøn tells us, discussing their identity for LA-based speciality coffee roaster, Stereoscope. “The colours are chosen to echo the natural materials used in the interior of the Stereoscopes locations,” he adds, noting the metal, stones, and wood found across their four locations, exemplifying the Olso-based design practice’s contextually-driven, systematic and fundamentally physical approach.

Known for the quality of its roasts and the expertise behind the scenes, Stereoscope has continued to challenge the conventional views of coffee since its founding, turning towards unconventional methods of processing and tasting. With this in mind, Olssøn Barbieri have championed the brand’s forward-thinking practice across the identity. Through copy and typography, they not only used the space as a platform to recognise the indisputable interconnection between coffee, climate change, capitalism and colonialism but identified that the coffee plant is a living organism and not a commodity. To cement this notion, Olssøn Barbieri went one step further and introduced a first-person narrative on the coffee bags from the perspective of coffee arabica, giving the coffee its own voice to detail its role in the world. 

To continue this motif typographically across printed and digital mater, the design studio opted for Brunswick Grotesque by Dennis Grauel as the hero typeface. Chosen for its lack of cultural or historical associations, the typeface is typeset unpredictably across the brand, using five randomly assigned widths. Whilst reflecting the incalculability of organic life, the use of five weights also references the five petals of the coffee flower, as seen in the logomark, and the five Stereoscope principles that make each coffee unique. Moreover, it alludes to the theory of five elements that Olssøn Barbieri investigated whilst researching the brand, guiding them down a thoughtful, profound path. 

The identity’s typographic approach led to encapsulating Stereoscope’s adage ‘In pursuit of depth and simplicity,’ introduced by the roastery’s founder Leif An, and its subsequent dedication to clarity – as well as their exploration of yin yang. Representing harmony, duality and balance, yin yang in Chinese cosmology extends to the universe’s formation, directly linked to Earth’s seasons and wild nature – a systematic-meets-poetic approach that Stereoscope sought to illustrate and embody.

“When researching the Tao Cosmology, we discovered that the eight trigrams,” where each symbol of the Bagua consists of three lines, he details, “are associated with different aspects of nature, locations and colours,” which the studio opted to implement throughout the brand. “The trigram we used in the cutout shape is Qian,” Olssøn concludes, “made of three unbroken lines, associated with the Creative, Northwest Cardinal direction, black, white and grey,” once again imbuing a contextual depth to the brand, bringing each visual application under its own ‘Sterescope Cosmology’ and comprehensive guiding philosophy. 

Olssøn Barbieri’s identity design expands beyond the poetic and into Stereoscope’s practical applications, creating bespoke packaging for the bean bag’s boxes and their subscription packaging. All utilising foil-blocked FSC-certified paper, the boxes encapsulate the overarching brand’s approach, displaying its eco-focus via material choice and its systematic nature through its colour-coded paper stocks and card-based labelling system. In addition, the box’s mountain-shaped design showcases its devotion to context, alluding to the high-altitude cultivation of coffee. Altogether, Stereoscope’s purposeful brand expresses the thoughtfulness of their practice and the poetry of their philosophy.

Olssøn Barbieri

Stereoscope