Daily Matcha

The identity has to survive a range of sizes and materials that almost nothing else does. Cut in vinyl across a shopfront. Printed on a foamboard A-frame standing on a pavement. Backlit on a screen above the counter. Set at thumbnail size in a story frame. Often two or three of those are in view at once, which is the real test: the mark cannot be adapted per surface, because the surfaces sit next to each other.

So it is built to be reproduced in one colour and placed rather than explained. A low, wide wordmark with a hand-drawn continuous-line signature beside it — the squiggle that ends up on windows, on cups and as a lone mark on a door. Nothing about it depends on a gradient, a shadow or a minimum size beyond legibility.

One green does the rest. A deep, unlit matcha rather than the bright powder green the category defaults to, because bright green reads as flavouring and dark green reads as tea. It is the only colour the system needs, which is what lets a menu board, a poster and a shop window read as the same brand from across a street.

The menus are the quiet part and the hardest. Essentials and Signatures, a winter series, milk options, level-ups, supplements — a lot of information, priced, in two languages of formality, that has to be read by somebody standing in a queue. They are set as one grid with the drink photographed the same way every time, so a new flavour is a new row rather than a new design.

And the feed was the same job. Launch frames for new drinks and seasonal series, built for the story format first and the grid second, so the brand arrives the same way whether it is met on a street corner or on a phone.