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cd expresssolution hamburg

un po' d'italia nelle vicinanze

The Espressolution Bar in Hamburg's Schanze district is more than just another coffee shop in the neighbourhood. It's not one that pays homage to sour highland roasts from Africa in an ascetically reduced ambience or filters them in a boboesque manner (see Wikipedia).

This bar has been a little piece of Italy in the centre of Hamburg since 2007, run by the two brothers Stefan & Toni, who come from a small village near Bari and claim to have more espresso in their veins than blood.

Their small café works just like all the 150,000 or so bars that can be found on every street corner in Italy. The Espressolution Bar is an institution that combines many things. It's a neighbourhood meeting place, a regular pub or a fast food joint. They serve great coffee (SAICAF), which really reminds you of your last holiday in Italy, delicious pastries and wonderfully toasted panini. You can enjoy it standing up or take it away. The whole thing is wonderfully unpretentious and without any fuss.

As the old logo was a little out of date, they asked us to give their little brand a new and appropriate look.

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With the word mark, i.e. the logo, we deliberately wanted to go in a different design direction than many other coffee shops. We also didn't want to orientate ourselves on classic Italian coffee brands.

Espressolution is a neighbourhood bar in Hamburg's Schanze district. A neighbourhood that is strongly characterised by street art elements. That's why we initially worked a lot with brushes and painted typography. But somehow that ended up being too deliberate, too artificial.

We decided to go with Canaro by Rene Bieder (a great type designer) as the font for the wordmark because it offers a unique but unobtrusive look with its sharp and elegant styles and lack of spikes.

With Canaro, we have designed a hybrid wordmark that works both in the classic horizontal and vertically in an unusual scale.

As we used the Canaro font for the wordmark, we also use it as a labelling font. The licence-free Google font Montserrat goes well with Canaro as a continuous text font and is also used in the web shop.

Red, green, yellow, orange and blue. Perhaps Ferrari red or British racing green? The colours are rich and vibrant and are contrasted by anthracite and copper.

We really wanted to bring a little more neighbourhood into the design, so we came up with the espressolution doodles.

They were painted while you sip your morning cappuccino in the small bar in Juliusstrasse, thinking about Hamburg and everything else and pondering how it all looks.

The poppy street art doodles complement the word mark and can be used freely as desired.