Brand identity and packaging for a specialty coffee shop in East Cobb
I shaped the entire Mzizi visual identity from the ground up, designing the coffee bag system, photographing the shop, and building the website that ties everything together. My goal throughout was to translate the warmth of the actual café into something a customer could carry home with them and continue to feel long after leaving the room.
When the owner first asked me to design the coffee bags, he had already ordered thousands of blank ones, which meant there was no real room to start the packaging over from scratch. Rather than scrap what he already owned, I sourced high-quality stickers that I could print onto directly, color-matched the inks to the existing matte black of the bag, and built a label system that reads as though it had been part of the original packaging from the very beginning.
What came out of that constraint is a small but adaptable visual language: the Mzizi wordmark sitting confidently across the top, a hummingbird crest cradled inside a ring of roasted beans, and a roast-specific tag at the base that lets each variety announce itself without disturbing the system around it.
The bag design and the photography were never meant to stay confined to the inside of the shop. Together they became the brand itself, the part of Mzizi that travels with a customer the moment they walk out the door, and I wanted that same in-person feeling to translate into something people could continue to experience from their own kitchen.
That intent is what set the tone for the website. The dark backdrop, the warm lamp-lit imagery, and the way the logo settles into the layout all carry the same low-light intimacy you find inside the café, so that every element on the page is asked to do the same job the room itself does in person, which is to feel cozy, considered, and rooted in something specific.
A visual library shot entirely on location at Mzizi, capturing the bag, the bar, the beans, and the smaller details that quietly give the room its character. The same set of photographs now lives across the website, the shop's social channels, and the prints that hang inside the café itself.
