From 2023 to 2025 I worked at a small lunchroom in Gouda, called ‘thee met…’ (tea with…). It selled cakes, pies, coffee and tea, which all was handmade. My task was to make coffee and help customers, but at some point I got asked to design a flyer. Because everything was handmade, I wanted to convey that into the designs, by hand-drawing the lines to make them wobbly and not straight. This was a one way project: they asked, I made. This is the result:
A year later I got asked to create a whole new branding for the company. A new color palette was requested, the green-ish color of the flyer wasn’t preferred. The logo was only available in a very low resolution, so it needed a revamp including the new style. I also had the idea for some graphical elements of the cakes that thee met… selled.
- The start of the branding: Colors
- Recognizability with Logo’s
- Defining styles using Graphical Elements
- Online usage: Website and Social Media
- The design being used
1. The start of the branding: Colors
Instead of green, a blue color was preferred. I made some options, a ‘safe’ one with two new colors, one with not a lot of change, and a third colorful ‘wildcard’ option. 3 was too colorful, not what the company stands for. 2 wasn’t an option because of the green color, so they asked to use option 1, altough it needed some more color variations.
2. Recognizability with Logo’s
thee met… started in 2017 with a logo of a teacup. When thee met… opened its first store in 2022, a new logo was introduced. Because the company wanted to extend its branding, and that logo was only available in the form of a small PNG image. The text beneath the teacup wasn’t readable on smaller sizes, enough reason to revisit the logo. Three new options, using the new colors, again a ‘safe’ option, one with little changes and a ‘wildcard’ with more changes.
The written ‘thee met…’ had to come back. Using the trace image option and manually refining the shapes in Illustrator I managed to recreate the text with vectors. The original text was written like ‘Thee met’, but the name of the company was ‘thee met…’, so I changed the uppercase T into a lowercase, and added the dots. This made the textlogo consistant witht the name.
3. Defining styles using Graphical Elements
Using the cakes as a graphical element was one of my requirements for the new branding. thee met… has very unique presentations for well-known cakes. Customers can order a one-person-sized cake. Using aquarel I made prototypes for the shapes and colors using pictures as references. These drawings were digitalized in Illustrator and I applied colors used in the drawings. The only problem was the colors didn’t match, so I tried different approaches. Eventually it was clear the ‘hue shift’ matched the best, because the colors were shifted towards blue, just like the brand colors. These icons were very nice, especially because they can be made very quickly.
As one of the staffmembers in the story, I recognized people struggling about the allergies. Icons were drawn by hand and often not readable at all. I introduced these icons, representing vegan, lactose free, gluten free, nut free and cafeïne free. The last one was important because I noticed that pregnant women regularly visited the store.
4. Online usage: Website and Social Media
To explore the brand style, I usually try a lot of different colors, shapes and sizes. By using this method I can quickly visualize my thoughts and see how compositions work. How do I implement the cake icons? How should buttons look? Should an image be squared or a custom shape? Answering those questions helps in defining the rules for a brand. Unfortunately I didn’t get to create the actual website, due to thee met… has stopped in August 2025.
5. The design being used
Customers of thee met… were having a hard time making choices. Usually the store presented at least 10 different options of cake, and a cafe with ‘tea’ in its name it wasn’t unusual to serve lots of different and special flavors. The biggest problem was that there was merely a list with text. To solve this problem, I thought of a menu that asks the customer questions resulting into a flavor that suited them.
Seeing this menu in action was a lot of fun. “I’ll try the flavor that I’ll actually land on!” and “I don’t know if I’ll like this flavor, but I’ll try it either way!” were reactions of customers. The last person actually liked the flavor. Completing the goal of customers being able to make a choice effortlessly was very important, but apparently it also stimulated trying out new flavors.
Another fun reaction of customers was the signage. thee met… was located in a small uninviting alley, with a lot of fast travelling cyclists, but only 10 meters from the city square. Any hanging signs or a small terrace wasn’t allowed, but a sign was. Using the cakes in combination with some fun texts, new customers were able to find the store. And it worked! People walked by, stopped, looked behind them, read the text of the sign again, laughed, and walked back to walk inside.
