Concept / Self-initiated
Hawdhan
حوذان
Identity and website for an imagined Riyadh roaster that releases its coffee with the Najdi seasons and describes it in the language of spring flowers.
- Sector
- Najdi specialty coffee roaster
- Services
- Brand Kit, Website
- Project
- Concept / Self-initiated
01
The brief
Hawdhan is an imagined specialty roaster in Riyadh: a self-initiated project to show how we build a brand and its website together. There is no client and no sales data. We wrote the brief ourselves, the way a roaster’s founder might have.
It asks for a name and an identity that read as Saudi at first sight without leaning on the dallah or the palm tree, a packaging system with room for four lines (house blend, single origins, seasonal releases and Saudi qahwa), café signage, and an Arabic-first online shop that works well on a phone.
Scope: strategy, logo, type, colour, bags and labels, cups, menu board, shopfront, and the website on desktop and mobile, in Arabic and in English.
02
Research
We started with desk research in public sources anyone can check. UNESCO inscribed “Arabic coffee, a symbol of generosity” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015, in a joint file from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and Qatar. In 2022 it added the “knowledge and practices related to cultivating Khawlani coffee beans” (source: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, decision 17.COM 7.B.24).
The Ministry of Culture ran 2022 as the Year of Saudi Coffee (source: Saudi Press Agency). On 15 May 2022 the Public Investment Fund launched the Saudi Coffee Company, saying it intends to invest about SAR 1.2 billion over ten years and to lift national production from 300 to 2,500 tonnes a year. The same release cites Euromonitor data putting growth in Saudi coffee consumption at about 4% a year between 2016 and 2021 (source: PIF press release).
What we took from it: in Saudi Arabia, coffee has become a point of local pride, not only a drink. That leaves room for a brand that talks about the place with confidence rather than nostalgia.
On the name: two different plants share it. In botanical dictionaries, hawdhan is the buttercup genus, Ranunculus, whose flowers usually have five petals (Arabic Wikipedia, “Hawdhan”; English Wikipedia, “Ranunculus”). In Qassim the name belongs to a seasonal herb that Qassim Region Flora identifies as Picris abyssinica, a member of the daisy family (English Wikipedia, “Picris”) with a single large yellow flower that grows in sand and in rawdas, the low meadows that turn green after rain (Qassim Region Flora). Our symbol takes its five petals from the first plant, and the season and the meadow from the second. Before adopting the name we searched the Saudi verified e-store register, the SAIP trademark database and the web, and found no business trading under it. The Ministry of Commerce trade-name search, which needs a Nafath login, still has to be run before publication.
We also looked through specialty roaster identities in general. Our impression, which is a reading and not data: many borrow Scandinavian minimalism, with Latin type and the Arabic added as a translation, and the ones that turn to heritage tend to repeat the same props.
03
Strategy
The brand idea is “coffee by the Najdi season”. Hawdhan releases its coffee with the seasons: one release each season, opening with it and closing when the harvest runs out, with the café menu changing alongside.
The audience is Riyadh’s specialty coffee drinkers who want to know what is in the cup, and people buying Saudi qahwa for home who want better beans.
Three pillars. The season gives people a reason to come back. The flower gives flavour a language (bergamot, apricot, sidr honey) and the roast a five-petal meter. The rawda is the visual source, so Najd shows up through its nature rather than its usual props.
Voice: headlines carry a light Najdi turn of phrase (“The hawdhan is out. So is the new harvest.”), body copy stays in clear Modern Standard Arabic, and the English is written on its own, in the same tone.
04
Identity
Logo
The symbol is a five-petal flower, drawn on the buttercup that botanical dictionaries call hawdhan, and every petal is a coffee bean with its crease. One bean turned five times at 72° reads as a flower from across the street and as coffee up close.
The Arabic wordmark starts from Reem Kufi Bold, outlined and redrawn in one detail: the dot of the dhal is a small flower. The Latin HAWDHAN uses the same family, widely spaced and set to exactly the width of the Arabic in the primary lockup.
Lockups: primary (horizontal), stacked, the symbol alone, either wordmark alone, and a one-colour version. The symbol never goes below 16 px and the primary lockup never below 120 px wide, with one petal’s length of clear space around it.
Typography
We chose two free fonts under the SIL Open Font License, each drawing Arabic and Latin in a single family, so the two languages share one voice.
Reem Kufi (Khaled Hosny, Santiago Orozco) handles headlines, signage and bags: a calm geometric Kufi that holds up at large sizes and carries the same shapes into Latin. Markazi Text (Borna Izadpanah, Florian Runge, Fiona Ross) handles running text: a clear Naskh for paragraphs, tasting notes and prices, with a readable Latin.
Arabic text uses Eastern Arabic numerals, English text uses Western ones.
Colour
Five colours taken from a rawda in spring: rawda green as the main ground, hawdhan yellow as the only accent, rawda night for text, blonde (the colour of pale Najdi qahwa) for paper and page, and cardamom for quiet panels.
Yellow never carries text on blonde, where the contrast is only 1.4:1. On green it reaches 6.1:1, so that is where buttons and highlighted headlines use it.
Palette
- Rawda green
#1F4A36 - Hawdhan yellow
#F3C53A - Rawda night
#12241B - Blonde
#F7F1E3 - Cardamom
#CBD5B5
05
Applications
The bags carry the line system: a colour for each line, the name large in Kufi, the flavour in three words, and the five-petal roast meter always in the same corner. The back label holds the region, the process, a filter recipe and a space to stamp the roast date.
Takeaway cups use the rawda pattern, flowers scattered at different sizes as if you were looking down on a meadow, while the qahwa finjan keeps a single flower under a yellow rim. The menu board is Arabic first with English as a quiet second line, and the seasonal release gets the yellow panel. On the shopfront the primary lockup sits on a green fascia, with the symbol alone on the round blade sign.
06
Website
The site is a shop and a café in one place: Arabic first and right-to-left, with a full English version that runs in its own direction. The home page opens on the current release, then the season calendar, the shop, the roast meter explained, the subscription and the café.
On a phone the same content stacks into one column: full-width buttons, a two-column product grid and a season row that scrolls sideways. The product page puts roast and flavour ahead of weight and grind, because that is what decides the purchase.
Every product and price in these mockups is sample content for an imagined brand.
Desktop
Mobile
07
Why it looks the way it does
Every choice in the identity and the site has a reason. These are the ones that matter most.
A meadow flower for a name, not a place
Town and district names are common among cafés and tie a brand to one spot. Hawdhan is a wild flower Najd knows in spring, so the name brings a season and a flavour story at once, and it turned up no trading business in the sources we checked.
The coffee bean as a petal
We wanted a mark that says coffee and flower without a word. A bean with its crease is the most legible coffee shape, and five of them make the flower.
The petal then became the unit of the whole system: the roast meter, the rawda pattern and the dot of the dhal in the Arabic wordmark.
Green and yellow instead of brown and beige
Coffee brands default to browns and neutrals, and desert-inspired identities often go all beige. A rawda after rain is green with yellow flowers: a real Najdi image that stands out on a shelf.
Yellow is kept to accents so it keeps its meaning, and we computed its contrast before setting any text in it, so it only carries text on green or night.
A five-petal roast meter
Words like light and medium mean different things at different roasters, and bare numbers are dry. Filled petals read at a glance on the bag, the menu and the site, in Arabic and English, with nothing to translate.
Fonts that carry both scripts
Reem Kufi and Markazi Text draw Arabic and Latin in one hand, so the English never looks bolted on, and both are open-licensed, so the owner pays nothing to use them.
The product page leads with roast and flavour
Specialty buyers decide on flavour and roast before weight and grind, so those come first. The brew recipe sits on the same page, so nobody has to look for it elsewhere.
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