The Design Process Behind Our Bags


Over the summer, the team at European Roasterie got together to work on the bag design for Velvet Hammer Coffee, our best-selling roast. We knew we wanted something that stood out, something that paid homage to the original design, and something that was fun to look at. 

The first question was, where do we start? One of the original label designs that we had for Velvet Hammer was this yellow and black splash motif. We thought this represented the brand well: fun, bright, bold, not your typical imagery of brown coffee beans and coffee mugs.

The goal was to create an entire bag design, not just a label, using that yellow-and-black splash idea. The process was definitely a long one, going through many possibilities of placement, color variations, and event deciding whether or not we wanted that metallic look across the bottom of the bag (an homage to the metallic texture of the word HAMMER in our logo).

The design process truly is a process.

After a while, we started to key into the look and style we were hoping for. The bold, flat splash pattern gave us that fun contrast we were looking for. Something still felt off about it though, as we were trying to find ways to make the logo and text stand out without being too crowded. We liked the logo on the top portion of the bag, but liked the yellow version of it better than the white. That's when we realized: why don't we flip the yellow and black sections? 

And suddenly, our design came together. The black and yellow contrast was perfect for what we wanted. Below you see a mockup of the bag design, compared to an image of the actual bags. Not a bad match, eh?
After some tweaking to the splash pattern, we landed on a great representation for Velvet Hammer, 2.0. Bright, bold, fun, and memorable; just like our coffee.