Deriving unique Vietnamese street culture, Guta Cafe grows to be a familiar coffee brand for urban people could connect and enjoy the outdoor environment. Focusing on responsive and affordable store setup, they have grown fast, dominated Saigon and become one of the most popular convenient coffee chain for everyone in the city.

Concept
Guta is from a Vietnamese verbal slang, from “gout /gu/” in French and “ta” in Vietnamese, together stands for the term “our style”. Representing for Guta’s brand spirit, they proud to serve a decently good strong Vietnamese coffee. From the most common culture of Saigon, street-coffee has become a fundamental habit of not just Saigonese but also Vietnamese. Beneath the habitual culture, there’s always a “plastic chair”, small and convenient to setup anywhere to become a small coffee shop.

The graphic system was taken over by the iconic chair as center combined with all surrounding environmental elements & people behaviors. All together, creating a complete unique “style” for Guta and echos what the brand comes from.

Color Palette
Inspiring from iconic Vietnam Social Security propaganda poster hanging everywhere around the country, the blue and yellow combination palette was adapted for Guta. The color palette choice played as a principle role to represent the idea “a friend of every worker” like the poster’s slogan.

Visualization
Here’s the usual habit for kicking start of the day for everyone who loves street coffee. They sit on a plastic chair somewhere shady and surrounding with greens, with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. After finishing their news and coffee, they started hanging out or ready for work.

The halftone printing effect on newspaper was regarded as communicating visualization for the brand and echoed different characters who sit on plastic chair around the country, from office worker to lady hawker. All together, reflecting a unique yet familiar culture of Vietnam street coffee for Guta philosophy.

Every character was selected carefully and representing a wide range of different characters from young to old, from blue collar to white collar. Each character with unique pose express their personalities and broaden brand visualization. All combines together, visualization and color palette, creating a unique yet consistent brand expression, easily to be adapted and extending according to marketing purposes.

Typography
Featuring the chair and Vietnamese diacritical marks, we has developed a custom font named after Guta, Fonta (our font), only for the extension of Guta child brands and special communication tools. After their success on rebranding, Guta has been growing from several stores to nearly 60 stores around the city and opened new child brands like PHỞ TA (Phở noodle) or CHỢ TA (convenient local store).

Menu
We completely renovate art direction and communication design inspired from the hole on top the plastic chair, giving the menu a refreshing presentation for in-store, website and even printed takeaway ones.

Uniform
To achieve comfort and functionality when serving outdoor in humid, sunny weather, uniform was designed with minimal basic 4D light Tshirt comprehending with shorts. In detail for branding, there’s an upside down pocket symbolized for the A-chair symbol.

Merchandise
For collecting and marketing purpose, we created a wide range of branded goods like keychain tag, case, socks, helmet, tumbler, lunchbox and even lighter.

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