Ground State Cafe – Brand identity

Ground State CafÉ

Brand identity

Ground State Café was run by the students as part of the group of enactus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) branch. The coffee shop was located in Jorgensen Hall (Physics Department building) on the UNL city campus. The faculty from the Physics Department conducted a voting event that decided the coffee shop name as "Ground State Café."

I was asked to design the brand identity with deliverables that suit the shop's appearance.

Background/The Challenges

This project was unlike other identity projects where there were obvious client or brand stakeholders. So I developed the creative/design brief based on the rationale that this shop is an extension of the enactus brand and the team of enactus UNL, as well as the "ground state" concept.

Ground State

Wikipedia: "The ground state of a quantum mechanical system is its stationary state of lowest energy; the energy of the ground state is known as the zero-point energy of the system. An excited state is any state with energy greater than the ground state."

One of the examples is the aurora Borealis' colors. "Auroras result from emissions of photons in the Earth's upper atmosphere (above 80 km ), from ionized nitrogen atoms regaining an electron, and from oxygen and nitrogen atoms returning from an excited state to a ground state." This information was the inspiration for the color palette.