Dean's Beans Organic Coffee Company
Our goal with the design of the bags was to tell the Dean’s Beans story in a more comprehensive, accessible, and artful way. From a messaging standpoint, we wanted to highlight the many ways that this company is doing sustainability differently than competitors. Dean forms long-term relationships with coffee growers, holds himself to higher standards than fair trade, and believes that the farmers should benefit from coffee sales in the form of micro-loans, healthy environments, and woman-empowerment initiatives (to name a few).
Many companies make similar claims, but Dean’s is the first and only coffee company recognized by the UN for its practices. The design was inspired by the 1960’s spirit of love and unity that sparked Dean’s life-long quest in the first place, and driven by the need to account for 30+ roasts and skews with a unifying visual language.
+ read more
To infuse Dean’s personality and story into the bags we used a visual tone inspired by 60’s street art — an aesthetic based on a revolutionary form of love. We used colorful, high-contrast, hand-illustrated patterns inspired by art from around the world to honor the cultural origins of Dean’s coffee farmers. Using concentric patterns, we focus the consumer’s eye on a dramatic hand (one for the single-origin bag and two for the multi-origin bag) offering up a coffee cup, as a nod to the partnership required to move the coffee beans from seedlings to the brew found in coffee cups around the globe. We didn’t want hands to feel culturally-specific, so we made a patchwork of colors and shapes to suggest an international love and bond. (Speaking of love, look for a heart shape in the steam rising from the coffee mug on the multi-origin bag.)
