Lya

Lya is a self-initiated brand concept for a small-batch coffee roaster. The brief I set myself: make coffee packaging that feels joyful on a shelf full of kraft paper and black bags, without tipping into novelty.

The identity is built from two ingredients only. A slightly irregular wordmark, drawn by hand and then cleaned up, and a family of soft colour blocks that can be cropped differently on every item.

Specialty coffee branding has settled into a look: minimal type, muted tones, a lot of restraint. That leaves room for a roaster whose product is bright, fruity and unfussy to look like it.

The packaging also had to work as a system. Bags, cups, jars and labels are printed by different suppliers, so the artwork needed to survive being cropped, shrunk and wrapped around curves.

Wordmark sketches → colour studies in gouache → a flexible cropping system → packaging dielines and mockups → label and cup variants.

Because the same person drew the mark, chose the colours and laid out the dielines, each decision could be tested straight away on the real item rather than described in a brief.

A complete identity and packaging system, ready to hand to a printer: wordmark, colour library, cropping rules and artwork for bags, cups, jars and labels.

This is concept work, so there are no sales figures to report. It exists to show how a full brand can be taken from a sketch to shelf-ready artwork by one person.