Passagem
A full rebrand, site and small online store for an imagined independent Porto coffee roaster.
Brief
The self-set brief: design a brand for a small, independent coffee roaster that could plausibly open in Porto's Ribeira district — one that roasts in small batches, sells direct through a small online store, and needed an identity and site that felt handmade rather than corporate, without looking like every other "artisanal" coffee brand.
Approach
The name comes from "passagem" — Portuguese for "passage" or "alleyway," a nod to the narrow Ribeira streets the concept brand is imagined to sit in. The identity leans on a warm, restrained palette against natural packaging materials, with a mark built from a simple arch shape referencing the district's stone doorways.
The site and store were built as a single Website Design & Build + E-commerce Builds brief: content pages for the roastery's story and process, plus a small storefront (under 40 SKUs) for bags of coffee and equipment, kept simple enough that a small team could run it without technical help.
Decisions
Constraint
A tiny catalogue (under 20 products at launch)
Decision
Built on Storefront Starter's scope rather than over-engineering commerce logic the brand didn't need yet.
Constraint
No in-house design or dev capacity
Decision
CMS and store admin kept deliberately simple, so a non-technical owner could update products and pages alone.
Constraint
Wanting "handmade," not "generic artisanal"
Decision
Avoided the genre's usual hand-lettered-script clichés in favour of a single geometric arch mark and a restrained type system.
Constraint
A brand that needed to feel local, not global
Decision
Copy, imagery direction and the arch motif were tied specifically to Porto's Ribeira, not a placeless "coffee culture" aesthetic.
What it demonstrates
This project is a concept piece, not a delivered client outcome — its purpose is to show how a Brand Identity, Website Design & Build and E-commerce Builds brief come together as one coherent project, at a scale a real small-catalogue retailer would actually commission.