01 — The Brief
A $200 florist, in a $5 cup.
Maurice Harris built Bloom & Plume as floral art — lush, Black, unapologetically ornamental, and mostly seen at $200 a stem. With his brother Moses he wanted a second front door: a coffee shop in Historic Filipinotown, next to the flower studio, that anyone could walk into.
Under Maurice's direction, my job was to carry the Bloom & Plume feeling onto the cheapest thing in the room — a paper cup — and everything around it: the illustration, the packaging, the shop, the website, the merch.
02 — Discovery
Beauty and power, which Maurice never separates.
His arrangements are one half of the reference — the color, the density, the refusal of a safe neutral. The other half is what the café is for: in his words, a space “filled with color, from a person of color's perspective, that centers people of color.” The identity had to hold both.
- — Palette pulled straight from Maurice's florals
- — African heritage referenced directly, not as decoration
- — Every surface speced to print cheap and reorder often
The Bloom & Plume seal already existed. Everything drawn on top of it was new: an icon, a botanical illustration system, hand lettering for every headline, and the objects it all lands on.
The fist and the rose
I drew the café's icon — a raised fist gripping a single rose, beauty and power in one line. It runs as neon on the wall and across every piece of merch.
A drawn system, hand-lettered
Loose botanical drawings pulled from Maurice's arrangements, and hand lettering on every headline — including the café's tagline, Thirst Come, Thirst Served — all of it mine, across the cups, bags, fans and merch.
A Kente cloth of the silhouette
The family's African heritage, referenced directly: a Kente-cloth pattern built from repeats of the Bloom & Plume head-in-keyhole silhouette. I designed and sourced the cups it prints on.
“Oh Taste and See”
Church-style hand fans, designed and sourced — a Black-Southern-church object dropped into a coffee shop, doing exactly the work the whole brand does.
Bloom & Plume Coffee opened in Historic Filipinotown in 2019 and still runs on the same drawings — the fist and the rose, the florals, the Kente silhouette. Thirst come, thirst served, in my hand lettering, on the cup and on the shirt.
