Fresh Coffee
Year:
2024
Industry:
Beverage
Scope of work:
Label and Packaging
Timeline:
10 weeks
Introduction
Amp launched into a canned-coffee category that mostly takes itself very seriously moody type, matte black cans, a lot of talk about single origin. Amp's founders wanted the opposite: a coffee brand that felt like the drink that wakes you up for the fun part of the day, not the commute. We built the identity around a grinning, wide-eyed mascot and a tagline the team had already been saying in meetings "coffee makes eyes fresh" and let that personality carry the whole system.
Challenges
Playful mascots are a fast way to look like a kids' drink instead of a serious jolt of caffeine, so the real challenge was calibration keeping the character loose and funny while the typography and color did enough heavy lifting to still read as an adult, grab-and-go product. We also had to design the mascot to survive metallic can printing, which flattens fine detail and shifts color more than most founders expect going in.
Final thoughts
The finished can leans fully into the personality saturated orange, a mascot who's clearly having a better morning than you are anchored by a wordmark bold enough to hold its own on a cooler shelf from ten feet away. It's one of the few projects where the client's internal joke became the entire brand platform, and it's held up through two production runs without a single tweak.
More Projects
