a force of nature in creative marketing
Case study - HomeCafé
A café that isn't a business
This project started as a joke between friends: "just come over, I'll make coffee" and slowly turned into something I wanted to actually design. Not a client brief, not a real business, just a personal exercise in building a brand from scratch: name, story, values, voice, and visual identity, all built around something I already do naturally turning my home into a small gathering place for people I like.
HomeCafé is a home café that opens "now and then" to friends: pour-over coffee, borrowed chairs, and occasionally a rack of my own secondhand clothes for people to dig through while the kettle's on. I wanted the brand to feel the opposite of polished: warm, a little imperfect, and built around presence rather than growth.
I treated it like a real client project on purpose: brand story, values, tone of voice, logo, colour palette, and typography, all pulled together into a full brand book. It's the kind of project I rarely get to do end-to-end, concept through to execution, so I gave myself permission to have fun with it.
Role
Generalist
Audience
My friends
Format
Brand identity, print, social media
Story
Where the idea came from
HomeCafé didn't begin with a business plan. It began with a percolator, a few mismatched cups, and a standing joke among friends. I wrote the brand's origin story, mission, vision, and values the way I would for any client just with myself as the client.
Visual identity
Logo, colour, and voice
The identity is hand-cut, two-tone, and a little crooked on purpose, built to feel handmade rather than mass-produced. I designed the logo lockups myself, picked a warm, coffee-toned colour palette, and paired a bold display font with a quiet, practical body type.
Brand in action
Off the sketchbook,
onto the door
The first real test of the identity: a poster for HomeCafé x Thrift, an actual event I hosted for friends. Same lettering, same palette, same easy tone just taped up somewhere real, inviting real people over.
I also made a small website for the project which can be found here:
Brand Book
Reflection
Playing client and creative at once
Working on a brand with no client, no deadline, and no real stakes was a strange kind of freedom and also a good test of discipline. Without anyone approving or rejecting decisions, it was tempting to keep tweaking forever, so I set myself the same constraints I'd expect from a real brief: a clear concept, a values framework, and a visual system I had to actually stick to.
The biggest lesson was in restraint. It would have been easy to make HomeCafé feel like a "cute side project" rather than a real brand. Instead, I tried to treat every decision, down to the tone of a single line of copy, the way I would for a paying client. Hosting the actual event and designing a poster for it was the part that made the brand feel real rather than theoretical, turning a slide deck into something people actually held in their hands.
If I take this further, I'd like to build out the social media side properly, content that shows the brand living outside the deck, not just describing it.