York Coffee Emporium is a York-based artisan coffee roaster that wanted to increase its reach and brand visibility through a complete brand refresh. We created an immersive visual world centred around distinctive coffee “characters” that reflect each blend’s unique personality and flavour profile, helping to differentiate blends and single-origin coffees. Using a combination of stock photography, Adobe Illustrator and generative AI, I created surreal digital collages that were retouched into custom illustrations for the coffee bag labels, with new characters continuing to be developed as the range expands.

The refreshed identity was rolled out across a new website, email marketing, animations and social media, giving York Coffee Emporium a playful, quintessentially British brand personality that engages customers across every touchpoint.

The project won a Gold award in the Beverage Branding & Packaging category at the 2025 global DIELINE Awards in New York.