“The black is a nod to the colour of their previous bags, but we needed to expand the palette to create a navigation system for the different types of roasts,” Olssøn Barbieri’s Founder & Managing Director Henrik Olssøn tells us, discussing their identity for LA-based speciality coffee roaster, Stereoscope. “The colours are chosen to echo the natural materials used in the interior of the Stereoscopes locations,” he adds, noting the metal, stones, and wood found across their four locations, exemplifying the Olso-based design practice’s contextually-driven, systematic and fundamentally physical approach.
Known for the quality of its roasts and the expertise behind the scenes, Stereoscope has continued to challenge the conventional views of coffee since its founding, turning towards unconventional methods of processing and tasting. With this in mind, Olssøn Barbieri have championed the brand’s forward-thinking practice across the identity. Through copy and typography, they not only used the space as a platform to recognise the indisputable interconnection between coffee, climate change, capitalism and colonialism but identified that the coffee plant is a living organism and not a commodity. To cement this notion, Olssøn Barbieri went one step further and introduced a first-person narrative on the coffee bags from the perspective of coffee arabica, giving the coffee its own voice to detail its role in the world.
