- Agency: Open Strategy & Design
- Client: Black Poetry
- Category: Packaging Design — Coffee
- Location: Mumbai, India
- Project Brief: Create packaging design for Black Poetry Sparkling Coffee that reimagines traditional coffee branding through classical portraiture, torn-edge graphics, graffiti, and street-art textures across three distinctive flavor variants.
Coffee packaging can signal a new way to drink a familiar brew when the can itself looks a little rebellious. Open Strategy & Design launched Black Poetry Sparkling Coffee, one of India’s earliest sparkling coffees from an artisanal brand known for careful sourcing.
The design draws on Beautiful Vandalism, a platform inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and the art of altering familiar cultural images. Carbonation changes how coffee behaves, so the cans take the classic codes of coffee and give them a fresh charge under the line Coffee, Ruined Right.
Each can opens on a classical oil portrait of a sitter holding a teacup, from a powdered lady to a mustached gentleman and a cat in a lace ruff. Halfway down, a torn paper edge rips the painting open and reveals neon scribbles, street-art doodles, and sketched hoodies underneath.
A high-contrast white serif spells Black Poetry across the top, with Sparkling Coffee set above it in spaced capitals. A clean white band at the base names each flavor in its own color, black for Classic Twisted, orange for Orange Spike, and brown for Chocolate Fused, beside claims like no milk and low in sugar.
