Kafka
Alcohol / Beverage / Luxury
Branding
Packaging
Canada
Kafka is a conceptual alcohol brand born from a single question: What if a spirit could feel like a story? This project went far beyond aesthetics it was about creating an experience that begins the moment you see the bottle and deepens with every interaction. Drawing inspiration from Franz Kafka’s surreal, often unsettling literary worlds, the brand identity was designed to feel layered, dark, and mysterious the kind of presence that doesn’t just catch your eye, but pulls you into its orbit.
The creative direction blended literature, psychology, and bold visual experimentation to create a premium spirit brand that feels more like an enigmatic character than a product.
Summary
Kafka was born out of a desire to explore narrative branding not as a marketing tactic, but as a design philosophy. The goal was to see if a brand could function like a novel layered, symbolic, and emotionally charged while still living in the real, commercial world of packaging and promotion. Instead of chasing loud graphics or trend-driven aesthetics, the identity leaned into intrigue. It was built to feel like something you discover, rather than something that shouts for your attention.
Every element from the raven logo to the textured labels was imagined as a piece of a larger story, fragments that would connect differently depending on who engaged with them. It was never about a single, clear message, but about cultivating mood, curiosity, and atmosphere. Through Kafka, I learned how to distill inspiration as abstract as literature and existential philosophy into tangible design choices, shaping a brand that could balance both mystery and market relevance.
Challenge
The creative challenge with Kafka was as much philosophical as it was visual. How do you translate the essence of “Kafkaesque” something inherently abstract, unsettling, and open to interpretation into a design system that works on a store shelf? The identity needed to be intelligent and layered, without slipping into obscurity or alienating casual consumers. It had to capture the emotional depth of Kafka’s work while still offering the clarity and accessibility required of a premium spirit brand.
On a practical level, adaptability became a major test. The brand had to extend far beyond bottles: secondary packaging, menus, coasters, posters, digital campaigns. Each format came with its own limitations from the tiny canvas of a label to the immersive scale of a bar wall. Ensuring consistency without flattening the brand’s character required a systems approach that balanced flexibility with cohesion.
There was also the narrative challenge: if this brand was going to operate like a story, every touchpoint needed to feel like a fragment of that narrative. Too much consistency would make it predictable; too little, and the identity would feel disjointed. Finding the right balance meant thinking like both a designer and an editor deciding when to repeat motifs, when to introduce new ones, and how to create rhythm without repetition. It wasn’t just about visuals; it was about pacing and atmosphere.
Solutions
The design process for Kafka began with immersion. Instead of jumping into logos or layouts, I spent time exploring the texture of Kafkaesque literature its unease, its ambiguity, its constant tension between the ordinary and the absurd. I asked myself: how does one translate disorientation into something tactile? How do you bottle atmosphere? That exploration became the foundation for the visual language.
I started by building a design vocabulary rooted in three principles: contrast, narrative layering, and tactility. Contrast allowed the brand to visually mirror Kafka’s juxtapositions light and shadow, clarity and distortion. Narrative layering came from repeating symbolic motifs across touchpoints, ensuring every label, menu, or campaign piece felt like a fragment of a larger story. Tactility grounded the abstract, turning concepts into something you could feel in your hands whether through heavy-textured paper stock, foiling, or brushwork.
The logo became the anchor. I developed it as a raw, handwritten scrawl sliced cleanly by a vector raven. It carried both precision and imperfection, echoing Kafka’s unsettling duality of human fragility and sharp critique. From there, each product label was designed as though it were a “book spine.” Every variant carried the title of an imagined story. In the Labyrinth, The Kafka Effect, Sins for Anyone. The visuals ranged from abstract ink blots to warped silhouettes, creating individuality while maintaining cohesion. Together, the bottles looked like an anthology a collection that rewards deeper inspection.
Scaling the identity beyond packaging required system thinking. For menus, posters, and social campaigns, I expanded the visual toolkit into expressive photography and brush textures, playing with negative space to keep intrigue alive. Each piece was meant to feel like a collectible artifact: a coaster that looked torn from a lost manuscript, a bar poster that read like a coded message, a campaign image bathed in chiaroscuro lighting. These artifacts, when experienced together, built an atmosphere of mystery and discovery like stepping into a story mid-chapter.
Process-wise, I treated cohesion as an editorial problem as much as a design one. Too much repetition would make the narrative predictable, but too much experimentation could dilute its essence. The solution was to establish “recurring characters” in the system shadows, handwritten textures, ravens, fragmented words while giving each piece space to reinterpret them in new ways. It was about rhythm, not replication.
In the end, Kafka became more than a visual identity it became a world. It operated on two levels: on the surface, as a premium spirit with shelf presence and commercial polish; and underneath, as a layered narrative waiting to be pieced together. For me, the biggest success was not in how it looked, but in how it made people feel: intrigued, unsettled, curious, engaged. Like the literature that inspired it, Kafka wasn’t just consumed, it lingered.