The Brief
The club already ran under branding borrowed from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The ask sounded simple: add “Coffee Club” to it for their regular meet.
Putting more merch out on someone else’s artwork is how you end up with a letter from a lawyer. So instead of bolting words onto a cartoon, I drew the club something it could actually own: a new logo that keeps the anarchic, everyone-in-a-different-car spirit, with no borrowed characters.
Roughs
The idea arrived in the first scribble: write the name long and low, wrap a racing-car body around it, and let the two big Cs double as wheels.
The second pass added a driver in the cockpit and a raked nose, and it started to look like it was moving.
The rough was redrawn at full size and the letters built up one by one. They bounce up and down and each has its own width, like a grid full of mismatched cars on the start line.
The inked body was then printed in greys, ready to be drawn on.
The Driver
The driver was the spot where the cartoon would have crept back in, so it got the most attention. I sketched head after head straight onto the proofs: helmets, visors, goggles, different angles.
It ended up as a scruffy dog in an open-face lid and goggles, inked in three versions before the final one went into the cockpit.
Colour
Every letter gets its own colour, as if each one was painted by a different team. The black body holds them all together, and a quick highlight on each letter makes the paint look glossy.
“Coffee Club” sits underneath in a relaxed script, like a sign-writer’s tag.
Lapel Badge
A long logo won’t fit on a shirt pocket, so the club got a second mark for the front left chest.
It’s a slammed coupé wearing a number 7, with the same dog driving, sitting on top of WRCC in the same lettering. It holds together small, and it has its own character, so it isn’t just the main logo shrunk down.
On The road
The logo goes big on the back of the tee and the badge goes on the front. Both were proofed as cut stickers before anything went to print. On car windows, the stickers do the club’s advertising for it.