Lovecraftian Coffee Branding

Overview

🎵🎶 The best part of waking up is madness in your cup 🎶🎵

This is a small personal project based on a design brief to create packaging for a fictional brand of coffee (as seen on this Dribbble Weekly Warmup). Let’s get crafty… let’s get… ‘Lovecrafty.’ Ha!

Lovecraft lore is amazing. It’s vast, dense, and varied enough to offer plenty of opportunities to grow a brand. With so many concepts and themes to riff on in the Eldritch world, this project focused on three ideas: a standard medium roast coffee, and bold brew, and of course a decaf — the most evil and maddening of them all.

Logo

R'lyeh is a fictional lost city in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Call of Cthulhu" first published in Weird Tales in June 1928. It is a sunken city in the South Pacific and a prison to the widely known entity called Cthulhu, who lies sleeping and dreaming…

Since coffee and sleep (or lack thereof) are two sides of the same coin, I’ve decided to call this coffee brand The Sleeping City.

I wanted the logo to work on a few different levels; it should represent coffee, Eldritch symbology, and of course have a memorable and easily recalled shape and meaning. Eldritch symbols are very cryptic, and little more than circular groupings of lines and curves; easy to recognize, but not much meaning behind the marks.

The Sleeping City coffee mark uses recognizable imagery to assemble an Eldritch-esque shape.

Brand Variety

There are so many elder gods from Lovecraft lore, it was simply a matter of choosing a few to represent the desired flavor profiles. Cthulhu seemed an obvious choice but ultimately didn’t make my final cut, in favor of more obscure entities:

Hypnos — Lord of Sleep (decaf)

Dagon — Ruler of the Deep Ones (dark roast)

Ghatanothoa — Lord of the Volcano (medium roast)

The following marks come from the Lovecraftian Bestiary. I’m unsure on which source to credit, so here’s a Google search that will get you to the Lovecraftian Bestiary poster.

Color Palettes

The three planned flavors could be represented by a warm reddish palette, a deep green ocean palette, and a dreamy hypnotic purple palette.

Packaging and Labels

Each coffee bag would have a metallic finish with illustrative art representing the elder gods. The labels themselves would simply be stickers to save on cost, and could be affixed to other items, packages, bags, and more. Here are the sketch ideas, label concepts, artwork, and finished mockups. I’ve included the side panels, package art, and photographic backgrounds used in each comp.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for reading! Loving the Dribbble Weekly Warmups as idea generators for practice projects. If you’re interested in the process, a large portion of this was streamed live on my Twitch.