Seven Productive Days ↦ TU7UHARI
It’s no secret that coffee shops have become a common ground (literally) for a lot of Jakartans. This however has in some ways led to a fault: with the fleeting growth of coffee joints, the city’s third-wave coffee culture is slowly cemented, yet over time it also cumulates in many offering what is more or less the same concept. In an industry where it’s getting harder to establish a distinctive identity, the TU7UHARI team approached us for support in optimizing their branding concept, ideation, as well as visual identity system & development. Together with the TU7UHARI team, we set out to explore opportunities for this new coffee shop. We took note of and focused on the founders’ idealism that work-life balance is, indeed, not for everyone. This becomes a perfect match for a segment we termed as ‘Highly Productive Millennials’, the go-getters for goals and dreams who are unbound by the 9-to-5 rule. We therefore decided to use this idea as our stepping stone. Most of these highly productive millennials use their favorite coffee shops as frequent meeting points, for both work and hangout—but why? Unlike the ‘daily-breaders’ who go through daily life as it is, they always try to impose a sense of ‘being-productive’ even on regular activities. For them, a hangout is a casual networking session, event attendance is live learning, working in a busy coffee shop is a way to stimulate new ideas, and so on. Aside from the atmosphere, the coffee itself has been known as their go-to productivity starter—always ready whether for delivery or on the go, a handy boost for their productivity, anytime, anywhere. This is how we came to redefine the new meaning of “Work-Life Balance” as TU7UHARI brand perspective: “Life will be happier when it’s balanced and not restricted by scheduled activities, but is instead filled with being productive and having fun, as flexible and as agile as you can.” TU7UHARI in Bahasa means seven days. It symbolizes the lives of these go-getters, always being productive even on the weekend, by the pressure of no one but their own drive. Inspired by the story of seven celestials of Babylonia which made up the seven days, we went on to build the monogram. The monogram consists of seven lines for the seven celestials. They might seem scattered at first, but take a closer look and you will notice the ‘7’ ‘H’ inside the arrangement. The dot inside the monogram highlights the role of TU7UHARI for its segment, as the new favorite meeting point for their productivity. We also infused the subliminal 7 on the logotype by altering ‘J’ with ‘7’, using a delicate yet modern monospace typeface—which in turn elevates the modern, clean, and minimalist look of its brand mark.