Zaik
Zaik is a brand identity developed for a hypothetical coffee shop in Queens, New York.
I collaborated with Giovana Ramos and Alena Imamura on this project during Aprender Design's Art Direction course with Eduarda Nieto in the summer of 2024. In the initial ideation phase, we explored Jungian archetypes to give the brand a distinct persona. We combined the wizard (or magician) and the helper (or caregiver) -- fearless, true-to-oneself, inclusive, positive, and socially engaged. When naming our coffee shop, we wanted to keep the name playful and funky, and one of our core inspirations was the imperfect perfection of a mosaic.
Most of my visual research was organized around the following topics:
1 Queens, New York City: the most ethnically diverse county and neighborhood in the US, as well as the city's largest borough. Layers and texture of buildings, overground metro trains weaving throughout. Brightly colored bodegas, corner stores with vernacular lettering or typography, often run by immigrants and their families
2 "Tapestry" of people and cultures: exploring graphic, colorful woven crafts from different cultures, many present in the city, for visual inspiration. A mosaic of dynamic shapes and textures unexpectedly working together to create something beautiful, even if they don't fit perfectly when seen up close.
3 "Breaking the mold" with playful lettering: experimenting with different tools and sketching methods, seeing if I could form shapes from literal mosaic + jigsaw puzzle forms, iterative exploration of tone. Our collective favorites came not from literal interpretations, but from sketches that evoked the same feeling of our research into these handcrafted objects.
We also took inspiration from vintage advertising and photography, notably centered around drag performers and queer subcultures. We defined our quadractic-ish color scheme and added a dark roast coffee brown, the connecting color throughout most of our maximalist-inspired designs.
The logo synthesizes our bold, graphic, textural inspiration: angular forms, dynamic "bird's eye" counter shapes, and an offset/angled arrangement. My initial sketches were done in pen and ink, then translated to rough vectors in Illustrator, and later refined in Glyphs.
While a clean sans serif may have been the obvious typeface choice for contrast alongside a bold graphic logo, I sought to push further in the funky direction. For ease of use and collaboration, I wanted to use a variable font native to Figma, and went with Omnibus Type's Rosario, available from Google Fonts. I loved the classical proportions, low contrast, and narrower letterforms. It also has some very fun ligatures and swashes, which felt like it tied into our queer, stylish target audience. To maintain contrast within the system and when used in conjunction with the logo, we went with an all-caps semibold header, slightly tracked out for legibility and emphasis. I wanted to keep the subhead the same size and proportionality, but in the light weight and sentence case, occasionally kerned tighter for a more elegant look. Body text is regular weight, legible yet elegant; a nice contrast with our loud, bold, funky aesthetic. Occasionally, we would use Uchen Serif, for example in social story graphics.
After digging into coffee shop social media accounts from NYC to LA to Toronto, we noticed similar events such as drag shows, community performances, and theme nights that would bring everyone together for a morning coffee or a night out.
Possibilities for outreach include shop merch, promotional video series, event marketing, partnering with local influencers and bloggers to create buzz about the space, and specific community initiatives. One specific industry is our loyalty/punch card, Mo, which leans into the brand's playful spirit. When discussing it with the team, we used it as a launchpad for a more impactful initiative: As a loyalty program, mo ties back into our goal of being a place for community building through coffee and in-person socialization, and allows members to get tangible rewards and a sense of empowerment via giving back to the larger queer community.