Coffee and São Paulo share a very intimate relationship, so it felt natural for Brazilian studio Casa Rex to draw on the chaos and harmony of the city for new coffee shop Beluga Café, the team explains.
Tell us a little bit about the project.
We developed the visual identity for Beluga Café, a coffee shop which opened its doors here in São Paulo at the end of last year. It’s located in the city's central area, a region that has been going through much needed revitalisation over the past decade, and has spawned a new following, becoming a sort of cultural hub.
How did the project originally come about?
Rodolfo Herrera, who owns the café with Flávio Seixlack, is actually the husband of one of our partners here at Casa Rex, Samia Jacintho. So, we've been involved with the project practically since its inception.
What was the original brief and did it change at all?
There wasn't exactly a formal brief; our encounters were much more discussions where we'd share certain thoughts and expectations, throwing around some ideas. And from these meetings, we ended up talking specifically about coffee, São Paulo and their intrinsic ties.
Historically, coffee and São Paulo share a very intimate relationship. Founded in the 1500s by jesuit priests, for 300 years São Paulo was nothing more than a village. It was thanks to the expansion of coffee production during the second half of the 19th Century that the city began its rapid growth, becoming the most important commercial axis of the coffee economy in the country. And so, it’s safe to say that without coffee São Paulo probably wouldn't have become the metropolis it is today. In view of all of these convergences, we felt there was a unique opportunity at hand to pay an homage to the city 'built on coffee’ and not only chose to take on the city's name, but created an identity that was our own contemporary representation of the city.
Did this project present any particular challenges, and if so how were these overcome?
How do we portray a complex city like São Paulo? Visual representations of cities have been done extensively, and most of the time, they are limited to representations of the their constructed landscape. But of course, a city is much more than that. And so we took the identity in a completely different direction, going way beyond a mere figurative representation of the city, to the complete opposite. We created a mash up of varied, and apparently unrelated elements, all pieced together into a subjective graphic synthesis of the city, which evokes both beauty and estrangement. However, these illustrations were a bit too complex to work across all their different applications: some needed to be a bit cleaner. And so in contrast to these representations of the city, we also developed a simpler side to the identity, formed of soft pastel colours and using typography in a more direct and austere approach.
Talk us through your process.
The project used the combination of varied processes and techniques, both manual and digital. We started through the development of different manual processes, from paint stokes, created in the most traditional way with black acrylic paint and a roller, to random lines and traces drawn with a roller ball pen. These were later scanned and used in digital fusions with fragments of photographs of the city, which were xeroxed in varied black and white copies, until achieving the contrast we wanted.
What do you think has worked particularly well?
This singular combination of both simple and complex imagery, as well as different visual techniques applied in its development, allowed the identity to float between two visual extremes – one more noisy, the other more subtle. We felt these captured the different nuances of São Paulo – dark and chaotic, but also bright and harmonious.
What was the client's feedback?
They were very excited, especially regarding the different possibilities which the identity allowed for. No material is quite like the other, each illustration is striking, and presents unique graphic subtleties to be admired on their own. Of course for us, the best feedback of all is that now we can get São Paulo's best cup of coffee for free.
casarex.com
