Twelve Twenty Coffee
Twelve Twenty Coffee is a mobile specialty coffee shop slinging hand-crafted beverages to events, festivals, and pop-ups throughout the DMV area. Anything they don’t make themselves, they bring in from woman and BIPOC-owned local businesses, like their beans, alt milks, and sweet treats.
The Project
Brand identity, marketing and event
collateral, custom merch, illustration
This project was a brand refresh to mark the transition from a brick-and-mortar shop to a fully mobile coffee business. We worked together on their original visual identity back in 2021, and knew we wanted to retain the core brand concept. The updated brand needed to convey a sense of evolution, maturity, and adaptability to suit a constantly changing environment, but maintain the familiar imagery and vibe that locals had come to love.
The Brand
The original visual identity worked in a cozy cafe atmosphere, but didn’t translate to their new mobile setup. The design needed to suit the sleek, custom trailer that would be popping up at everything from corporate events to weddings to farmer’s markets. We opted for a cleaner, more contemporary look by redesigning the logo to be minimal and type based, and simplifying the color palette.
The challenge was to maintain the core brand elements the locals fell in love with. The non-negotiable keepers were the typeface and the unofficial Twelve Twenty mascot, the barista goddess. This image, based on the Temperance tarot card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, holds symbolic meaning for the owner and her inspiration for the original cafe concept. We kept the same general themes for imagery and tone: a unique and playful blend of retro-Afro-futurism and occult imagery. At the official relaunch, we introduced a custom-illustrated coffee tin depicting a coffee shop in a spaceship that combined references to previous (and much loved) merch we had created for the brick and mortar store.
