Ethiopia’s coffee co-ops deserve a stronger brew.
Editorial design and creative direction for a print product designed to help Ethiopia’s most reliable and consistent coffee growing co-operatives make international connections at enterprise scale.
Project Services
- Branding
- Art Direction
Technoserve
- Ingmar Swalue
- Luís Sousa Teixeira
Technoserve is a Washington, DC-based NGO that helps small scale co-ops in developing nations make business connections and operate at a scale and with process that allows them to work at an international enterprise level, while remaining true to their communities.
Ethiopia’s Forest Coffee is a high-end print atlas of the country’s best coffee co-ops, designed to help them grow beyond their current fluctuating relations with smaller third wave and independent roasters, and instead begin conversations with the really large scale producers — think Starbucks and Nestle.
Alongside tasting profiles and cupping scores, Ethiopia's Forest Coffee Atlas also vividly details the everyday lives of the farmers and co-operative members of Ethiopia's villages and forests through interviews and photography.
It met with such resounding success that other primary industry bodies in Ethiopia reached out to Technoserve and the government to ask for similar tool.
A true atlas can be put to work.
The book’s design foundation is the classic motifs of the historical wayfaring atlas. Latitudes and longitudes are used as ornamental elements, and spatial organization and relation between the co-ops is a key navigational tool within the book.
As the intent of the book was to vividly render the experience and geography of Ethiopia’s coffee industry, further insights on the regions are added to enhance the browsing experience and bring these faraway forests to life.
“The design is fluid, with captivating photo placement and content which reads like an interesting story book. The Ethiopia Forest Coffee Atlas has been widely shared at numerous coffee conferences in Ethiopia and it is always well received with our global audience. It’s the benchmark for future projects.”
Nora Wagman, Program Specialist, Coffee at TechnoServe
You need to smell the coffee.
Counterbalancing the core aesthetic of the atlas, we chose a saturated, reportage style of photography. The target readers of this book needed to feel life in these regions deeply and vividly.
Just as importantly, they needed to get the sense of those beans and their journey from harvest to roast. A color scheme built of deep reds, rich browns, and earthy greens triggers the senses and takes the reader right there, your cup freshly brewed, ready to sip.
