Tiny Footprint Coffee
Designing Trust In Every Cup
The live site as it stands today, some inconsistency remains across pages, which echoes the original gap this project addressed
Defining the Opportunity
Tiny Footprint Coffee had a real logo and a rough color palette, but no formal brand system: no guidelines document, no typographic hierarchy, and no rules governing how the brand should look or feel across touchpoints. That inconsistency showed up directly in the product. The live site felt, in the words of multiple research participants, like "three different brands."
The deeper problem sat downstream of that: this is the world's first carbon-negative coffee brand, funding reforestation in the Mindo Cloudforest and women-led farms. That's a rare, defensible differentiator. But without a coherent brand system to carry it, the mission read as scattered marketing copy instead of a believable, premium identity, which directly undercut trust at the exact moment people were deciding whether to buy.
My Role and Constraints
I owned brand identity and product design end-to-end: new logo, typography, color system, formal brand guidelines, and the full e-commerce redesign. I worked with a client stakeholder who commissioned the project and held final approval, though I was the sole designer on all execution. Solo design work, single external stakeholder, four weeks, and no existing guidelines to inherit from. The relationship required defending design decisions directly to the client stakeholder with final approval authority, which surfaced real disagreement at least once during the brand identity phase, detailed below.
A Mindful Pour
A carbon-negative coffee brand had an inconsistent logo, no brand system, and an e-commerce site that buried its strongest asset: verified environmental impact. Working with a client stakeholder, I rebuilt the brand from the logo up, defended a contested design direction with data, and then used that system to redesign the full digital experience. Tested head-to-head against the live site, the redesign performed stronger across trust and conversion intent.
My Role
Product Designer — UX/UI · Design System · Brand Integration
Team
Solo Designer
Stakeholder Critiques
Peer Critiques
Timeline
4 weeks
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Illustrator, Photoshop,
Research and Discovery
With the brand system established, I moved into research on the product experience itself. I combined a self-run survey, structured interviews, and moderated usability sessions with a competitive audit against Verve, Onyx, Blue Bottle, and Intelligentsia. The core method: I watched the same participants use the existing live site, then use my redesigned Figma prototype, in the same session, and measured the difference in behavior and self-reported trust between the two.
The clearest finding: people wanted to see their impact immediately while shopping, not go searching for it on a separate page. A second, related finding confirmed the brand system hypothesis directly. Participants independently described the live experience as inconsistent, using almost the exact "feels like different brands" language that had motivated the rebrand in the first place.
What I assumed going in, that this was a visual polish problem, didn't hold on its own. The real problem was twofold: no system to be consistent with, and no sequencing of proof at the moment decisions were actually being made.
User journey map showing where customers needed more clarity, trust, and impact proof before deciding to buy. This helped connect the brand system to the actual purchase journey, not just the visual identity.
Insight → Decision
The inconsistency finding validated what the brand audit had already surfaced. I treated the new brand system as non-negotiable infrastructure for the redesign. Every product screen had to be built from guideline components, not styled independently.
The client's instinct toward an illustrative, immediately recognizable logo direction was reasonable but untested. I treated that decision as something worth validating rather than deferring to either of our instincts. I brought informal testing data into the conversation rather than resolving it through opinion on either side.
Participants wanted impact to be visible immediately rather than discoverable, I built a dedicated Impact Dashboard as a destination, but also pushed impact microcopy directly onto the product page beside the purchase action. I treated sustainability as a feature inside the buying decision, not a separate marketing destination.
Redesigned e-commerce flow showing how users move from brand discovery to product browsing, checkout, impact proof, and repeat purchase. The flow helped translate research findings into a clearer shopping structure.
Design Process
For the logo and type system, my first internal direction leaned more illustrative, closer to a typical eco-brand aesthetic. When I presented this alongside a more restrained, a cleaner mark-and-wordmark direction, the client pushed back, preferring the illustrative direction. It felt more immediately recognizable as a sustainability brand, a reasonable instinct given the category.
I held the cleaner mark-and-wordmark direction instead, bringing informal testing data into that conversation: the restrained mark consistently read as more premium and more credible, less like a sustainability badge and more like an established coffee brand competing with Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia. The client's concern was legitimate, but the data suggested the illustrative direction traded credibility for a signal that users did not need spelled out that literally. The final approved logo became the selected direction.
For the homepage hero, I tested a benefits-led headline against a direct, blunt value statement. Participants given the benefits-led version struggled afterward to articulate what made the brand different. The direct version, "You drink coffee. We plant trees.", was understood and repeated back accurately almost every time. That became the final prototype direction.
For the Impact Dashboard, my first pass was metrics-only. It tested as credible but flat. Adding a map of the Mindo Cloudforest and photography of the women-led farms made it register emotionally in sessions.
I used Figma AI to generate roughly a dozen layout variants of the PDP confidence layer, evaluating each against the principle that had emerged from research: reduce hesitation without adding reading burden.
Old Logo
New Logo
The final approved logo system became the selected direction because it felt cleaner, more flexible, and easier to apply across the full ecommerce and packaging experience.
Impact and Outcomes
These numbers come from comparative usability testing: the same participants using the existing live site, then my prototype, in the same session. They are not production analytics.
Conversion intent improved 38%. Checkout completion intent improved 25%. Self-reported trust increased 21 points. Subscription sign-up intent improved 36%. Bounce and drop-off behavior improved 27%. I also modeled the redesign's business potential using a traffic × conversion lift × AOV model, which suggested a directional Year 1 revenue lift of approximately $260K.
Product Detail Page
Reflection
If I did this again, I'd formally test the logo direction against the illustrative alternative the client preferred, rather than relying on informal feedback to settle that disagreement.
Next experiments: personalized impact dashboards for returning customers, region-specific carbon insights, and a real production A/B test to validate these numbers at scale.
Final Design
The product detail page became the highest-craft surface in the system: product image, flavor notes, roast level, subscription toggle, and impact microcopy sitting directly beside the purchase action. A confidence layer below includes sourcing detail, roast slider, reviews, FAQ, and gives a hesitant shopper a reason to stay rather than leave.
The brand guidelines document anchors the system: the final approved logo, the earth and cream color palette, the type hierarchy, and tone of voice direction. Every product surface was built from that foundation, including a shared component library covering buttons, product cards, stat bands, impact meters, and FAQ accordions.
I built this as a fully interactive, clickable Figma prototype, approved by the client for the comparative testing described below.
