Brand Redesign
Infusing Culture into Branding
Café Guatemalteco is a local independent café celebrated for its traditional coffee and an exceptionally warm, conversational atmosphere inside. However, there is a jarring disconnect between the shop’s welcoming interior experience and its understated, low-contrast exterior, leaving the brand inconsistent and overlooked from the street. This self-initiated redesign establishes a cohesive, high-visibility identity that aligns the physical storefront with the vibrant cultural space within.
Café Guatemalteco suffers from an exterior discovery barrier, where faint signage and low-contrast visuals cause the storefront to blend into the street and go unnoticed by passing commuters. Because the brand lacks a high-impact, consistent visual system, its vibrant interior culture fails to translate to the sidewalk, resulting in lost foot traffic and weak neighborhood recall.
A four-stage creative framework grounding the rebrand in cultural heritage, strategic positioning, hand-crafted ideation, and scalable multi-surface execution.
How might we translate Café Guatemalteco’s warm, community-driven interior into a bold, high-contrast visual identity that commands street-level attention?
Designing the café wanted to focus more on the culture of Guatemala, while also wanting it to be known as a café — which is where the coffee bean heart comes in, to include family.
When it comes to Hispanic culture there are a lot of vibrant colors, so I wanted these colors to pop and took the greenish color from the native bird.
The bottom is the logo without a background; the top two are more for branding objects that would be used on an apron, napkin and coaster. The yellow is more for the smaller objects.
The clear zone of the “C” part of the logo signature name
Armada felt more ancient and old with its style; together it feels like you are looking straight at the font, this being used in the logo. Trilby is used in the menu with the different styles based on hierarchy — the black being for the title of the menu, while medium italic is for the subtitle of the food category.
