Blank Street Coffee launched in August 2020 as a 5 x 10-foot coffee cart—really, a small trailer—set into the garden of Brooklyn’s Wythe diner. Today, with locations in New York, London, Boston, and Washington, DC, it has become a cult favorite of those who eschew traditional coffee chains and instead prefer a more aesthetic, personal experience.
The chain’s original logo was very basic: just two lines of sans serif centered on itself, with green as the core color. Wolff Olins has elevated that design by imbuing it with so much more meaning. The first change is the addition of a blank window that not only reflects the brand name, but which also can be filled with whatever meaning the viewer can imagine. In its icon version, the window stands in for the word “Blank.”
Wolff Olins designers selected Regular Sans for the system’s primary typeface and Remarkable Sans as the secondary face. There’s just enough play between the two faces to create interest. Outline versions of the faces can also be used like blank windows; they can also be animated to be half-filled or filled completely, like a cup of coffee.
The new “Blank Street Green” used with the system is accompanied by a secondary palette of greens that were named for the changing colors a Blank Street cup “takes on in morning, afternoon, and evening light.”
