Containers removed
No circle, no square. The word became the shape, so it took all the space available to it.
Case study · Saudi Arabia · 2024
Purple Cups
A specialty coffee roastery in Jeddah. One creative platform, and a packaging system with room for every new harvest.
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Part one · 01
Building the brand
Specialty coffee in a crowded market. What separates one bag from the next isn't taste alone. It's what the eye takes in before the bag is ever opened.
A Saudi roastery with more than twenty harvests
Purple Cups is a specialty coffee roastery based in Jeddah. It sources its harvests from Ethiopia, Colombia, Brazil, Uganda, Yemen and beyond, roasts them to order, and sells them through its online store.
- More than twenty harvests · each from a different country, each with its own flavor profile.
- Roasted to order · no ready stock sitting on a shelf.
- Saudi made · a Saudi Made stamp on every bag.
- Direct to consumer · an online store with pay-later options through Tabby and Tamara.
The challenge was to give each bag a personality of its own without loosening its tie to the parent brand.
Four problems with the old logo, not one
The idea was there from the start: a digital clock typeface. The problem was never the idea itself, but its execution and the layers stacked on top of it.
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01
Three containers for one nameThe word inside a circle, the circle inside a black square. Every container eats into the name's space, so the logo ends up the smallest element in the frame.
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02
A comma where an apostrophe should beIt was set as CUP,s with a comma and a small hanging s. A spelling error inside the logo itself, repeated on every bag that gets printed.
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03
A hairline weight that loses legibilityThe digital typeface is finer than anything readable on a coffee bag or a thumbnail-sized product shot. A hairline is the first thing print takes away.
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04
No mark at allNothing works on its own: no app icon, no stamp for a cup, no mark that survives small-scale printing. The full name or nothing.
From a badge inside a square to a word that stands alone
The new version here is vector art pulled straight from the original identity files: what you see is the logo itself, not a picture of it. Notice how much more of the same frame the name now fills.
BEFORE
The name inside a circle inside a square, andCUP,s with a comma
AFTER
The word is the shape, and the coffee bean is a mark that works on its own
Spelling fixed, weight thickened
CUP'S with a proper apostrophe, and the digital segments turned into solid blocks that read from a distance.
A mark that works alone
A coffee bean inside an octagon built from the same segments. It works as an app icon and as a stamp on a cup.
We kept the clock, and rebuilt it
The digital clock idea did not come from us. The client explicitly wanted it, and for good reason: the taste for vintage was peaking in the Saudi market in 2024. So we did not scrap the idea. We rearranged it and rebuilt it.
What we added was the creative platform that gave the idea its meaning:
IT'S COFFEE O'CLOCK. On its own, the name Purple Cups says nothing about coffee. This line is what tied the clock typeface to the product, instead of leaving it a style choice with nothing behind it.
ON PAPER · primary use
ON BRAND · over the purple
ON PACK · over the black bag
A seven-segment typeface
Every letter is built from straight segments with cut corners, exactly like digital clock numerals. This is what the client wanted, and this is what we kept.
The bean inside the octagon
The mark is built from the same segments, so it never looks pasted on. And it is the only yellow element, so it becomes the point where the eye stops.
The creative platform
IT'S COFFEE O'CLOCK is set in the same typeface, with COFFEE alone in yellow. The line is part of the brand, not a caption underneath it.
Two colors lead, two carry
Purple is the brand's own name, so it is not up for negotiation. Yellow is an accent, not a background: the moment it spreads into a surface, it loses its job as the place the eye stops.
Aa
Aa
Aa
Aa
Paper 46%
Charcoal 26%
Purple 20%
8%
Flat Icons, no gradients, no shadows
Every icon is built from solid color areas. The reason is practical, not only aesthetic: these shapes will print in different colors for every harvest, and gradients do not survive recoloring.
Half from here, half from there
The camel, the palm and the dallah come from the Gulf. The coffee branch, the bean and the cup come from the harvest's home country. The vocabulary itself traces the journey: from the farm to the Saudi cup.
The shape is fixed, the color changes
The camel is the same camel across all eighteen varieties. What changes is the square behind it. This separation of shape from color is what made the whole system possible.
Part two · 02
The system
Eighteen varieties on one shelf. Designing each one separately means eighteen decisions, and eighteen chances to break the consistency. So we built one rule instead of eighteen designs.
A grid of eighteen squares, one composition
The pattern is not a repeating ornament. It is a composed collage: a 6×3 grid, one icon per cell, with the camel alone crossing three cells to tie the whole row together. The style is Mid-Century Modern Geometric Art: flat geometric shapes, solid color areas, and hard edges with no gradients.
Colors in the base version
Hover over the composition to see the grid
One pattern, colored by the flag of origin
This is the whole rule. The shapes never change. What changes is the cell palette: it takes the flag colors of the country the harvest came from. So the shelf reads like a map, and we design once instead of eighteen times. Pick a country to see its bag.
Why this is a system, not a design: a new harvest does not call for a designer. It calls for a flag and five color values. That is the difference between an identity executed once and an identity that lives and grows.
From the bag to everything the customer touches
The cup, the gift box, the sticker sheet. The same band at the same relative height every time, so its position in the frame becomes a signature you would recognize even if the logo were cropped out.
The cup flips the ratio
On the black bag the pattern glows. On the white cup it becomes the only block of color, so it works from further away.
The box is purple, not black
A gift is not a product on a shelf. So it took the name's color directly, and the band stayed in place to tie it back to the family.
The stickers unpack the pattern
Every icon steps out of the grid and becomes its own piece. Among them a digital clock reading 12:59, one minute before coffee o'clock.
Posters & Designs
In the Saudi market you do not sit the seasons out: Ramadan, Founding Day, store promotions. All of them ran on the same icons, with no separate seasonal identity.
What matters most in a brand is that its name means something in the consumer's mind and heart. And when a visual identity is built on a clear creative platform, every element in it earns its meaning and its clarity.
Got a product line that keeps growing, where every addition means a new design from scratch? That is exactly the kind of case we work on.
Mesh-Mosh © 2025 · Purple Cups assets pulled from the official identity files