Creating deliberately. Passionate about visual expression, learning, and helping others

Designing Kona Coffee Labels

Dark haired woman with coffee

AI design

I was asked to create labels for Black Rock Farm’s Kona Coffee. Grown and roasted on the big island.

It was so much fun and quick using AI design tools. It took no more than a day in total (an hour here and there).

Years ago they had a label that featured a close up of a women picking coffee. I began with that idea.

The process

Using AI, I experimented with various prompts to generate images that represented coffee, farms, and Hawaiian culture.

One of the most challenging aspects was dealing with artifacts that occasionally appeared in the generated images. For example, an AI generated image may have extra letters in words or even giberish, too many fingers, or other oddities.

In one of these images, the coffee cup seemed to merge into the woman’s hand. Can you spot other artifacts?

To address these issues, I would import the images into drawing software and manually adjust, clean up, or improve them.

AI generated, can you spot the artifact?
AI generated, can you spot the artifact?
AI generated first thought
AI generated, watercolor style image

Models and artifacts

I added a model to the idea. Aiming for a woman enjoying a cup of Coffee.

Can you spot the artifact in the second image? There is something very strange about her left arm behind the cup and there’s that melting cup handle. This is where I will bring AI generated images into drawing software for editing.

Getting closer

As I presented these rough unedited AI generated images to the couple that own the farm, they’re vision of what they wanted began to take shape.

They asked about a watercolor style image of coffee trees in the foreground with Kealakekua Bay in the background – the view from their home on the farm.

By now they had also provided dimensions for the overall label. 3″ x 5″ and I began generating vertical images.

They loved the image below, and so do I. It still needed some manual tweaking. The farm is actually high up on the mountain that you see in the distance. We needed to change the point of view to looking out from the mountain and remove the lettering. Also, the coffee cherries don’t all ripen at once. I asked for photos so that I could recolor them more realistically.

They provided spectacular photos of the growing coffee with the bay in the background. Ultimately, we used one of those photos.

The copy

I wanted to offer them a font that is unique, and stands out. Changing gears I engineered an AI prompt that produced this:

You may note the artifact that I call gibberish encircling the word Rock. We kicked around ideas for those words.

The farmers thought that making the O in the shape of the Big Island would highlight the coffee’s origin. That was fun to make using Affinity Photo software.

The Final Label

One of the photos they sent had everything we were shooting for with the bay in the background, and coffee cherries in the foreground. I put together a 1st draft using their photo, the edited copy with an island shaped letter, and other info.

They love it and moved forward with printing.