CUPO
Coffee for creators — a mark you can read and drink from.
The brief
CUPO is a coffee brand aimed at creative people — the ones working out of cafés at seven in the morning. The name was the starting point; the brief was to turn it into something that could sit on a billboard as comfortably as a takeaway cup.
Tagline in hand from day one: Coffee for Creators.
The challenge
Coffee branding is crowded with beans, cups and steam. The mark had to use that vocabulary without looking like everyone else who uses it.
The approach
01 / 04- 01
Discovery
We looked at the letters before the objects. ‘CUPO’ has a cup hiding in it, in more ways than one.
- 02
Concepts
The U and the P were pushed together until the U became the body of a mug and the bowl of the P its handle; three droplets rising from the rim finished the thought.
- 03
Refinement
A chunky, slightly hand-cut wordmark was drawn to match the icon’s energy, then set in a warm two-tone palette.
- 04
Rollout
Lockups in brown-on-cream and cream-on-brown, a mono version, a standalone icon, a coffee-bean pattern and a wordmark repeat, plus billboard, light-box sign and street poster applications.
The identity
A mug built from the letters U and P, with three splashes for good measure — the kind of visual pun that gets noticed once and remembered after.
Coffee brown, cream and a muted tan. The wordmark is deliberately imperfect, hand-cut rather than typeset, so the brand feels made rather than generated.
The rollout
Advertising01
Signage02
Advertising03
Logo04
Asset05
Asset06The result
A logo with an idea in it, a tagline that says who it’s for, and patterns that let the brand fill a wall or a cup without repeating the logo.
Set next to Noctive, it shows the two ends of the studio’s range: warmth and play on one side, restraint on the other.
