Café do Brasil – design notes

It started on a holiday in 2019, where we saw shapes on a fabric design that – always on the look out for design ideas – made us think of stylised coffee beans.

We’d been thinking about doing coffee-themed t-shirts for a while so the stylised beans helped to kickstart the design. At first we played with the idea of Coffee Weekend, a social, relaxed kind of thing, fitting in with the idea of a sociable coffee.

Adding a striped pattern to one half of the beans added some texture and depth to the design.

Fuelled by caffeine, we worked deep into the night…

Should we go for a decorative, mosaic-style design?

At some point, Coffee Weekend morphed into Café do Brasil (Coffee from Brazil). We were looking at warm, coffee-friendly colours.

More shapes and options entered the fray

We almost settled for this design…

But then we saw having the beans tumbling down had a livelier shape

We decided to replace the ‘coffee-like’ colours in favour of something cooler and more contemporary. As the shirt was to be launched in February, we went for a darker background with fresh spring-like beans. We had a dark heather grey for the short-sleeve…

… and black for the long sleeve. Short-sleeved shirts normally outsell long-sleeved shirts by about 4 to 1 but with the winter launch date we think the long-sleeve may do better than usual.

You can see more of our Café do Brasil t-shirts on our shop here.