Sunwheel.
A third-wave coffee roastery opening their first café in Príncipe Real, Lisbon. They asked us for a brand and a website. We gave them a system that flexes from a small espresso cup to a 30-foot mural — and a site that loads in 0.4 seconds on a 3G connection.
Lisbon doesn't need another minimalist café.
Sunwheel landed in a city where every new coffee shop looks the same: bone-white tile, Helvetica logo, oat milk on tap, a Bauhaus print on the wall. They wanted to show up — not blend in. The owners run a tight ship: three roasts, no syrups, no decaf. The brand had to mirror that confidence.
Loud mark, tight system.
We built the identity around a single mark: a wheel of dots, each one a roast level. The wordmark is set in a custom display we drew specifically for Sunwheel — wide, generous, slightly cartoonish. The body of the system uses three colours: sunrise yellow, bramble brown, and an electric blue that nobody else in coffee is using.
For packaging, we kept the front nearly empty — wordmark, weight, the wheel. Every detail you'd want as a buyer (origin, altitude, process) lives on the back, in a tight monospace. The whole system reads from across the street.
Four pages.
Under 30KB.
Sunwheel is a café, not a SaaS. The site is four pages — menu, story, shop, visit — and the whole thing weighs less than a single emoji on a corporate landing page. Hand-coded HTML, three colours of CSS, zero JavaScript dependencies. Loads in 0.4 seconds on a 3G connection in Roma Norte.
Numbers we're allowed to share.
- Opening month traffic
- 12k
- Org. social reach Q1
- 218k
- Press features
- 14
