Wasan

English name
وسن
Sector
Speciality coffee & hospitality
Location
Saudi Arabia
Year
2026

A full visual identity and packaging system for a Saudi coffee and hospitality brand that sells in store and is given as a gift — in a language that says generosity without borrowing ready-made heritage ornament.

Wasan — Hospitality & coffee identity · Packaging

Project Overview

Wasan is a Saudi coffee and chocolate brand pairing carefully made coffee with a warm atmosphere. The hard part of its positioning is that it lives two lives: a cup bought quickly in store, and a box presented as a gift — and each expects something completely different from the design.

The Challenge

Saudi hospitality brands usually fall into one of two traps: literal heritage ornament that reads as museum, or international modernism with no sense of place. Wasan needed both at once — unmistakably Arabic and genuinely contemporary.

Strategic Thinking

In Saudi Arabia coffee is not a drink but a ritual of hospitality. So instead of designing a "café brand" we designed a language of generosity: a box opened in front of a guest, a bag carried into a home, dates and chocolate beside the cup. That decision is what made packaging the centre of the system rather than an accessory to it.

  1. An Arabic wordmark drawn with soft curves and open terminals, paired with a lowercase Latin of the same softness — so neither reads as a translation of the other.

  2. A palette of deep olive, gold and cream: weight worthy of a gift, warmth worthy of a cup, with no glossy gold that would tip the brand into ostentation.

  3. Designing the packaging system first — boxes, cylinders, tins, bags — and deriving the rest from it, because that is where the brand is seen longest.

Brand Positioning

We positioned Wasan as a contemporary Saudi hospitality brand: generosity is the idea, coffee is its medium. That is why packaging and gifting occupy more of the system than the café materials do.

Wasan — Identity application
Wasan — Secondary shot

Identity System Logic

The wordmark works in two lockups: the Arabic alone where that is enough, and the full Arabic-plus-Latin lockup where the brand needs to read internationally. It works embossed on leather and board, stamped into chocolate, and lit on a storefront — three techniques the mark was tested against before sign-off.

Visual Language

Deep olive is the brand's ground: it gives calm and weight and lets the gold act as an accent rather than a layer. Cream carries the paper goods and the cups. The photography builds on the vocabulary of the place — the dallah, the dates, the brass — as elements of a scene rather than ornaments printed on a box.

Colour system

  • Deep Olive #3E3B26
  • Gold #BE976A
  • Cream #F0E2CA
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system
  • Wasan — from the visual system

Design System

The system was delivered ready for a brand that both sells and gifts: gift boxes and sets, cylinders and tins, bags and carriers, hot and cold cups, chocolate and date boxes, staff uniform, the in-store menu and the storefront sign.

  • Arabic and Latin wordmark in two lockups
  • Colour system and usage rules
  • Gift and packaging system
  • Cups and in-store materials
  • Staff uniform
  • Menu and storefront signage
  • Art direction for photography

Outcome & Impact

The box now carries the brand on its own: the olive and the drawn letterform are enough to identify it before the name is read, whether on a store shelf or on a table at home.

Services behind this project

Ready to start

Is your brand ready for its next project?

Start your project