The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Ants Coffee behaves like an anthill. People arrive on their own, settle in and, without anyone organising it, become part of something larger. It was that behaviour, rather than the coffee, that Tuman Studio took as the starting point for the family-owned coffee shop’s identity, building the brand on the way a crowd assembles itself. The New York-based strategy and design studio designed the logo, wordmark, typographic system, illustration, packaging and motion, applied across both of Ants’ Brooklyn locations.

By the time Tuman came in, Ants had already existed for almost two years, so the community the identity would go on to represent was in place. “I don’t think the rebrand created the Anthill,” one of the shop’s Co-founders, Nia Odzelashvili, tells us. “It simply gave it a name.” A decade of hospitality experience and the relationships built around the shop had already shaped what Ants was, so the task was to bring that together and name it, not to reinvent it. The collaboration with Tuman had begun as a friendship long before there was any talk of branding, Odzelashvili adds, and “by the time we started working together, there was already a great deal of trust.”

The logomark is built from the silhouette of an anthill – a rough, organic form with an uneven outline – within which the letter ‘A’ emerges and, looked at again, an ant. “We never treated those three ideas as separate symbols that needed to be combined,” explains Co-founder & Creative Director, Irina Kosheleva. “We started with the logic of an anthill itself – an irregular form built through many small actions. Once that shape felt convincing on its own, the ‘A’ naturally appeared within it, and the ant emerged almost as a byproduct.” Some people see the anthill first and others the ‘A’ or the ant later. From there the idea spreads outward, the letters themselves starting to look like ants.

Coffee branding usually opts for clean restraint or a heritage roaster’s badge, but the intent for Ants was always to go the other way. “We ruled out polished minimalism very early,” Kosheleva recalls, “because it didn’t reflect the founders,” or the social atmosphere they wanted to create. “We set behaviours rather than compositions: rough contours, loose sketches, chaotically scattered typography, uneven spacing and a restrained colour palette,” she details. “These are principles, not templates.” Every application follows the same behaviours without repeating another exactly, “since an anthill isn’t a template either.”

The typography pairs two very different choices. Dinamo’s ABC Oracle Triple, with its deliberately irregular spacing, sits against the rough, hand-drawn letters of Cactus Jack. Oracle Triple “reminded us of ants moving towards an anthill,” Kosheleva notes. “Each letter keeps its own rhythm and distance, like individuals travelling together without becoming uniform.” Cactus Jack is the more instinctive layer, its rough letterforms standing in for “the tiny sticks and fragments ants carry while building an anthill – imperfect, slightly chaotic, yet purposeful.” The palette is cream and black, with a touch of olive borrowed from Greenpoint. “The olive references Greenpoint’s trees, parks and quieter residential streets,” Kosheleva observes – it’s a restrained accent that introduces warmth and local character but never dominates.

The identity also moves thanks to motion designer Artem Vernidub. “Letters disperse, drift and regroup into words the way ants leave and return to a trail,” Kosheleva explains. “What first looks random gradually reveals itself as organised through countless small decisions.” Motion, she adds, reveals “the process of self-organisation, not just its result” – the one thing a still layout can only imply.

Since the identity went live across both Brooklyn locations, the clearest change has been in the way people speak. “Today, both our team and our guests naturally talk about being part of the Ants family and the Anthill,” Odzelashvili concludes. “That shared language has become part of who we are.”