Building Small Business Branding from scratch: Magic Opossum Midnight Coffee Bar

I’m an illustrator/ brand designer and my branding studio specializes in small business branding. However in my off time I do a lot of personal work just playing around with watercolor color pencils and the other night I ended up staying up late fishing this painting.

And maybe it’s just that I should have gone to bed several hours ago or that I’d been too focused on work earlier in the day but for some reason all I could think was that this painting would look great behind a late night coffee bar.So the idea of the Magic Opossum Midnight Coffee Bar was born! I will never have the energy (or desire) to turn this into a real coffee bar but it is the perfect opportunity to share how I might build a brand from scratch!

We can start by putting our hero image behind the bar. Honestly it’s not as perfect as I hoped but it looked pretty nice on the cafe wall too.

We have the starting place of the image that’s going to go behind the bar, and the name Magic Opossum Midnight Coffee Bar, so we’ve already got something of an aesthetic. I’m not going to bother much with thinking about a mission for the business because this is just for fun but if I were building a real brand this is where I’d want to get a really clear idea on things like why you’re doing this, what experience you want your customers to have and the overall feeling you want your business to give because all of that is going to go into brainstorming for the next step.

That out of the way I’m going to start with brainstorming for a primary logo. If you're wondering where to start I’ve got a whole post on how to do your own logo, but I like to start with finding the overlap with the vibe/ mission you have and what works in your industry. Then just play with it, let creativity be your guide and see what you come up with!

Normally I’d just choose the best one and stick with that but, I’m going to take a few and use them as secondary logos for things like merch, and other places that might benefit from a little illustration.

Because this isn’t going to be a real brand, I’ll probably reuse some of the illustrations in places. And that might actually be a pretty decent hack if you're thinking about updating your small businesses branding and you don’t have the money to redo the entire thing.

I’m going to use the primary logo for some signage and packaging on the coffee cups.

These secondary illustrations can be window wraps and maybe on some other packaging packaging.

Plus merch with everything!

What do you think; would you visit the Magic Opossum Midnight Coffee Bar?