kahaani cofffee
kahaani cofffee
During my gap year I partnered with a startup coffee roastery, Kahaani Coffee Roasters, to create their brand identity with essential assets, social media visuals and promotional graphics for Kahaani Coffee Roasters, gaining experience in designing products to engage customers.
"Kahaani" is a Urdu/Hindi word that translates to story in English.It can refer to any kind of story, whether fictional or non-fictional, and encompasses a sequence of events or incidents.
I collated inspiration across Yemeni, Pakistani and Indian cultures for product artwork and packaging. I am currently working on producing culture based art for merchandise and alternative packaging for specific collaborations with cafes and restaurants serving the coffee.
Website Development Process:
Brainstorming, collecting photo inspiration from photoshoots in our home countries.
qatar
doha
I took inspiration from these mood boards to start creating the brand design, keeping the tan and colourful tones consistent throughout the site.
I created the website for Kahaani coffee using Canva and Shopify, and I manage the instagram for Kahaani Coffee.
pakistan
lahore
This (above) is inspired by the art style we saw in Doha and some of the styles I have seen in the Islamic World section of the V&A, London, where many different styles across the islamic world across up to a thousand years are displayed. The style feels almost modern, with its sharper lines, and minimal strokes.
This (right) is inspired by the one of the owners heritage being Japanese, I styled the arabic lettering in the japanese tategaki (縦書き), which is the vertical writing. As there isn’t a big coffee culture in the far east, but heritage was important to our Kahaani (story), I experimented with this style.
Development for Kahaani art, at Kahaani we don’t want to just have coffee, we want to build a community for second and third generation children who love coffee.
The art I am developing is all in the process, these art the concepts.
stylising the name “kahaani”
Arabic, like most writing tools is such a beautiful to play with, there are so many types of stylisation we can work with. Initially I practiced writing the word “Kahaani” in a couple ways.
Matchboxes were initially imported into India from Sweden and Japan in early 20th century, followed by their local manufacturing in Bengal and South India. The diversity of visual and cultural symbols found in India helped in the depiction of a huge variety of images on them.
Beyond the practical aspect, matchboxes hold an emotional significance in South Asian culture. They are often associated with warmth, hospitality, and the aroma of home-cooked meals.
Phillumeny (also known as phillumenism) is the hobby of collecting different match-related items: matchboxes, matchbox labels, matchbooks, matchcovers, matchsafes, etc.
My sister-in-laws father has a wide collection of matchboxes which inspired me to experiment with matchboxes.
I then moved on to discovering some styles that I would incorporate into our artwork, including packaging, merchandise and art.
I experimented with the traditional arabic typography, most similar to calligraphy. This mirrors the traditional styles show in the moodboard above, especially as many of the pieces from Pakistan are hundreds of years old, we took inspiration from our home.
Here I brought in the latte art into the name. The swirls made by the milk is very similar to the art style of older South Asian art, which blends perfectly together in this concept piece.
