Lya

Lya is a self-initiated brand concept for a small-batch coffee roaster. The brief I set myself: make coffee bags that look fun on a shelf full of kraft paper and black, without turning into a gimmick.

The whole identity is two things. A slightly wonky 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.

I drew the mark, picked the colours and laid out the dielines, so every call got tested on the actual bag straight away instead of argued about 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.

Concept work, so no sales figures. It’s here to show a whole brand going from sketch to shelf-ready artwork.