How to Make a Coffee Shop Logo (+ Coffee Shop Logo Examples to Inspire you)

Coffee shops are some of the most competitive restaurant types in the industry. Although coffee is a $70 billion/year industry and coffee shops have lower startup costs than other restaurant types, coffee shops operate on narrow margins and have to compete with many large chains.

Coffee is an everyday habit for 60% of Americans and many people frequent the same shops, either because they love the coffee or because it’s just more convenient. Major coffee chains have seen a 10% increase in sales post-pandemic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your coffee shop has seen or will see the same growth.

A major factor in coffee shop viability is brand loyalty. You want customers to love your coffee enough to come back every day and engage with your brand. That’s where a coffee shop logo can be very effective.

In this article, you will learn how to make an effective coffee shop logo that endears customers to your brand and makes them want to come back every day.

Why is a coffee shop logo important?

Like fast food restaurants, you can probably identify most major coffee shop chains by their logo. That’s the power of branding. The Starbucks mermaid and Dunkin’ orange and pink DD may be the most prominent logos in the coffee industry, but even smaller players like Peet’s, Caffe Nero, and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are readily identified by their fonts, logos, and overall branding.

Branding plays into a human penchant for togetherness. When people become loyal customers to a coffee shop brand, they eschew other brands to find their local Starbucks rather than try a new shop. It’s almost like rooting for a sports team; you become loyal to one and the others suddenly don’t matter as much.

On a local level, small coffee shops with great branding will come to mind before competitors that don’t have recognizable branding. When customers decide they want a coffee, a logo might even come to mind before an actual drink order.

What to consider when making a coffee shop logo

A local coffee shop isn’t going to have the same reach as a national chain, of course, but a great logo can differentiate your coffee shop from other local players. When it comes to making a coffee shop logo, there are a few important things to keep in mind.

Budget

Balancing your coffee shop’s budget is always important, but it’s especially crucial when making an investment that’s outside of your everyday operating expenses.

Unless someone on staff has design experience, you’ll have to hire a graphic designer to create several logo options to choose from. Then, you’ll need them to provide files for printing on a range of items, from a big logo for your sign or window to logos on menus, flyers, social media, and other advertising. Depending on the designer and the scope of the project, logo design could cost anywhere from $2 to more than $2,500. Generally, the most budget-friendly option is to work with an online coffee shop logo maker or work with a freelance designer rather than hiring an agency.

While an agency might offer more coffee shop logo designs and templates to choose from, they’ll charge significantly more for what may feel like too many options.

Timeline

Your timeline ties directly into your budget. If you have a long runway before you plan to launch your logo, you can go through multiple revision rounds and give a design team plenty of time and feedback to land on the perfect design. However, the more time they work, the more you’ll have to pay in hourly fees.

With an online logo maker, designing a logo could take literally minutes. Working with an independent designer, however, it will likely take between 4-6 weeks.

Knowing your timeline will help you craft a budget and plan when it’s time to replace certain inventory with new, branded items.

Customer base

The most important goal of a coffee shop logo is to resonate with your target customers. You want to turn casual customers into loyal ones and loyal ones into adherents. Understanding what customers like about your coffee shop in the first place is essential when planning a coffee shop logo design project.

If they connect with a certain aesthetic of your coffee shop, you may want to play up that your shop is a place to work, read, or enjoy music and open mic nights. Maybe your coffee shop’s concept is more fast and casual so you want to appeal to the commuter element. Maybe you’ve stuffed the shelves with comic books and want to play up the nerdiness of your coffee shop! Whatever it is that makes customers love your coffee shop, your logo should reflect that.

How to make a coffee shop logo

Every coffee shop owner will have their own coffee shop logo design process, but this is a solid guide to follow.

Start with your brand

As we just touched on, your brand and logo should be tightly aligned and appeal to your customer base. Before delving into a logo, take some time to reflect on your coffee shop branding.

How did you come up with your coffee shop’s name? What’s your company mission? What is your vision for your coffee shop and its place in your local community? Are you all about being pet-friendly like LA’s Muddy Paw, ethically sourcing coffee beans like Cincinnati’s Deeper Roots Coffee, or proud of your drive-thru culture like San Antonio’s Brevity Coffee Company?

Think about what makes your brand different, and go from there.

Build your vision

When you have a good idea of what makes your coffee shop brand unique, it’s time to think about the logo itself. You might immediately have an idea of a character or physical object you want to feature prominently in the logo. Maybe you like your coffee shop’s name as an acronym in a cool font. Now is the time to identify the colors, images, fonts, and design elements that appeal to you. Playing around with an online logo maker (or even a Word document if you’re leaning towards lettering) is a useful way to find inspiration without committing any money.

Choose a logo design avenue

When you have a good idea of what you want, it’s time to decide how to make a coffee shop logo. There are a number of avenues you can take.

Hire a professional graphic designer

As we touched on before, hiring a freelance designer is much cheaper than hiring a graphic design agency. That said, you can still expect to pay a good designer an hourly rate of $24 or more depending on where you’re located.

A designer will help you flesh out good ideas, eliminate flawed ones, and take the design process out of your hands. They’ll give you all the files you need and help you figure out how to incorporate your new logo into your branding. They’ll make things easy for you, although it may take up to six weeks to settle on a logo.

Do it yourself

If you have some design experience, doing it yourself is always the most budget-friendly avenue. Of course, it will be the most time-intensive and difficult, as well. But if you have a very specific vision in mind, creating it yourself may be the best option.

Use a template or generator

The internet is rife with logo design makers. Tools like Canva, Looka, and Themeisle Logo Maker allow you to input a little information and leverage artificial intelligence to create a range of logo options. You can also work off templates to create the right coffee shop logo for you.

Logo design makers tend to be cheaper and faster than professional designers, but you won’t have the same ability to make nuanced changes.

Edit and iterate (and get other people’s opinions!) 

Before you go live with your new logo, make sure others love it as much as you do! We know you have great taste, but the coolest restaurant logos are ones that are crowdsourced and verified to appeal to customers before they go into mass production.

Taking your logo to your staff, friends, and select customers will help you see things you might have missed. Maybe the color you chose isn’t quite a hit, or the font isn’t coming through as clearly as you hoped. Whatever it is, feedback is important to get before you commit. Not to mention, showcasing the logo to others will help you do some soft competitor analysis to ensure you’re not treading too closely to copyright infringement.

Copyright and trademark

According to the United States Patent Office, trademarking your logo is as simple as Application, Examination, Publication, and Registration.

Basically, that means if you want to protect your logo from scammers and copycats (which you should), you should file with the USPO. You can hire a company like LegalZoom to do it for you or trust your regular legal counsel to handle the details.

What makes a great coffee shop logo?

In the coffee shop world, branding is everything. Frankly, what makes a “good” logo a “great” one isn’t going to be the same for every person. We all have different tastes, which is why we choose different coffee shops in the first place. A great logo is one that resonates with your customer base. That said, here are a few examples to get you inspired:

• Starbucks: It’s one of the most recognizable logos in the world for a reason. Since opening in 1971, Starbucks has featured the mermaid as its logo. Over the decades, they’ve refined the logo into a square that focuses on the mermaid’s face, making it easy to patch on napkins, merchandise, and even the app. It’s artistic, but not esoterically so, and harkens to the brand’s humble origins in Seattle’s Pike’s Place Market.

• Roadrunner Coffee House: Arizona-based Roadrunner Coffee House’s logo accomplishes a lot in a little roadrunner icon. The roadrunner itself tributes the region as well as Southwest art in an energetic logo.

• Barnabé Café: A more classic design, Portugal’s Barnabé Café is a font-focused logo that projects class and quality. The decorative serif font and three-dimensional letters feel straight out of a noir Hollywood film.

Tips for making a great logo

To guide your coffee shop logo design process, think of the following things.

Make it clear and easy to read

The worst logos are the indecipherable ones. If you can’t read the font or figure out what the logo actually is, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Keep it true to your brand

Making your logo a stack of books next to a cup of coffee might seem artsy and cool, but if your coffee shop doesn’t have seating, it probably doesn’t make any sense. Your logo should reflect your brand and its mission.

Make it memorable

There are a lot of business logos out there competing for a finite amount of space in customers’ brains. While making a memorable logo is easier said than done, it’s important to try to make your logo different or unusual in some way to make a more lasting impression.

Avoid being too trendy

Sure, one-third of Americans aged 18-29 report going to a coffee shop recently (compared to 25% of older Americans), but that doesn’t mean your coffee shop logo should only appeal to trendy young people. Avoid obscure references, ostentatiousness, or brazenly “young” fonts. You don’t want your logo to alienate anyone.

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A great logo for your coffee shop might look a lot different than a great logo for another coffee shop. That’s the beauty of coffee — one size does not fit all. If you’re wondering how to make a coffee shop logo, start by identifying the important aspects of your brand and what it is your customers love about your coffee shop. Then work from there.

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