My role
UX/UI Designer
Year
2025
Domain
Web Design
Time to read
4 mins
Overview
Honu Coffee Co is a premium Hawaiian coffee brand built around single-origin beans, local farming, and charitable giving. The name comes from the Hawaiian word for sea turtle, a symbol of prosperity and longevity, reflected in the logo where a turtle lives inside the letter O.
I designed the complete brand identity, packaging, and web experience across 6 page templates and 3 breakpoints. From the visual language to the coffee bag design, every detail built to belong to the islands.
6
Page templates
3
Weeks
3
Breakpoints
Web
Platform
Challenge
Hawaiian coffee has a quality problem. Not with the beans, but with how it's presented. Competitor research across four brands revealed a consistent pattern: outdated interfaces, broken links, and visual language stuck in early 2000s hibiscus aesthetics. The product was premium. The experience wasn't.
Honu's differentiator was handpicked single-origin beans, a rarity even within Hawaiian coffee. The design needed to match that standard.
Research approach
I interviewed 4 coffee drinkers to understand how people discover and buy specialty coffee online. The key finding: most Hawaiian coffee subscribers had only discovered it by visiting a plantation in person. That's an incredibly narrow path to purchase, and the biggest opportunity.
Exploration
For Honu we needed a visual language that felt earned, not assembled. Wireframes came first, needed to test content flow before committing to anything visual.
Then I ran an experiment. Instead of collecting references by style, I mapped emotions to design layers: harmony through typography, freshness through imagery, responsibility through grid and composition, premium through color. Each layer had one job. When all four clicked together, I knew I had the right direction. The layout, color, and type pairing fell into place almost immediately.
Typography & Grid
Cardinal Fruit for display, Inter for interface. Navy anchors the premium feel, the counterpoint to coffee brown. Beige keeps the layouts warm and open. Every color earns its place.
Key screens
Outcomes
Honu was delivered in 3 weeks. The research-driven approach, grounding visual decisions in how people actually discover and choose specialty coffee, resulted in a brand experience designed to convert browsers into buyers.
What I learned
The strongest design insight came from user research, not references. Learning that Hawaiian coffee discovery is almost entirely physical, tied to plantation visits and in-person experiences. It shaped every decision about how the brand story was told online. A great brand needs a great idea behind it.
What I'd do differently
I started too creatively and had to scale back. Too many button variations, too many distinct elements. Simplifying took time I could have spent building something more scalable from the start.
I'd also invest more time in user research. Four participants gave me direction, but more voices would have sharpened the insights further.