Amaryllis Coffee Bar // Oman

Background. Amaryllis is a Coffee Bar that is being set up in Oman, where this kind of venue is often a mixture between the western classic urban concept and a more luxurious and stylish one.  The client provided the name Amaryllis and some architectural renderings of the coffee bar interiors to create an appropriate and coordinated brand identity. My brief was to design an elegant visual brand identity that could fit well with the sophisticated exclusiveness and stylish scenery created by the interior design.

Creative process. While doing the initial research for this branding, it occurred to me that the word Amaryllis can be abbreviated in “AMA”. In Italian, the word ama comes from the verb amare, to love, and that evoked in my mind the phrase “Ama il caffè”, which means “love coffee”.  AMA is also a palindrome, so I created a custom typeface that emphasized its symmetry. The custom wordmark is created starting from a serif typeface, which I used also for the full name, Amaryllis, and the “Ama il caffè” lettering, to maximize homogeneity and thus elegance and style.

Primary and secondary logos. For both the primary and secondary logos I gave more importance to the AMA lettering. Being very short and perfectly symmetric, it’s easier to remember and much shorter than Amaryllis, thus more effective for attention-grabbing, brand awareness and brand recognition. I also inserted a graphical element that went along with the presence of vegetation planned to be an integral part of the interior design. 

Fun fact: although Amaryllis is the name of a plant that generates beautiful ruby red inflorescences, the client didn’t want me to use it as a visual element.