More work
Things made for their own sake
Goth Juice is one of the things I make when nobody's paying me.
Explore the Cut Records story Back to all workCaffeinate the misery.
Turning a stupid name for coffee into a completely unnecessary fictional brand.
It started with a stupid name.
A friend of mine refers to coffee as Goth Juice.
Or possibly Goth Water.
Either way, Goth Juice was better.
I liked the joke enough to wonder what it would look like if it were real.
There was no client, no brief and absolutely no intention of starting a coffee company.
I just wanted to make something.
Then I found the logo hiding in a coffee cup.
The identity started with a simple circular coffee cup viewed from above.
That became the G.
From there I started wondering whether the other letters could be treated the same way.
The O became a swirl of coffee.
The T became an inverted cross.
And the H completed a set of four pictograms that could work individually, together as the word GOTH, or animate into the complete identity.
Obviously it came in black.
Developing the colour palette for a fictional goth coffee company was not the most demanding part of the project.
Black. White. Done.
The stripped-back palette let the pictograms, typography and copy do most of the work.
The copy was where it got stupid.
Once the identity existed, coffee language provided plenty of material to ruin.
Nothing into something.
Goth Juice never became a real coffee company.
That wasn't really the point.
It was an excuse to take a throwaway phrase, follow it for a while and see whether there was an identity hiding inside it.
There was.
A logo.
A visual language.
An animated mark.
Packaging.
A tone of voice.
And far too many coffee-related goth jokes.
Sometimes that's enough reason to make something.
