Industry
Year
Role
Scope
Problem
Chleb z Masłem is a breakfast bar concept in Kraków that serves one thing: great bread with homemade butter. It enters a crowded breakfast scene full of pricey plated toasts and over-explained concepts. The brand had to make a one-dish menu feel iconic, speak to young city dwellers, tourists and food lovers, and stay honest, with no extra ideology added to bread and butter.
Solution
A joyful, no-nonsense identity built on simplicity. A bold wordmark sits in a ticket-shaped badge, an expressive accent typeface meets the clean Stack Sans family, and a calm base of navy, beige and butter yellow is lifted by punchy green, orange and pink. A playful cow, close-up bread photography and a strict 8×10 grid tie it all together, from menus and butter jar labels to posters, Instagram and merch.
Result
A launch-ready brand system: logo suite, colour and type system, labels for the butter range, menus, posters, social templates and merch.
Storefront: the badge logo on the window, the cow mascot and a launch poster that promises the best bread and butter in Kraków.
Insights
Simplicity is the product. The whole concept is one dish. The brand couldn’t add complexity the menu doesn’t have, so every decision went through one filter: would bread and butter need this?
Kraków’s breakfast scene is crowded and serious. Mapping competitors like Zaczyn, Breaking Bread, Fornir and 8 rano showed most of them lean on craft and calm. The joyful, accessible corner was open.
Bread and butter is for everyone. Inclusivity in price, place and time was a core value, so the brand had to feel friendly, not like an exclusive foodie spot.
Process
I started with a brand sprint: a 5-year roadmap, core values (simplicity, quality, inclusivity), the golden circle, personality sliders and a competitor map.
From that I wrote the creative brief: values, key audiences, value proposition and an elevator pitch.
Then moodboards and five rounds of concepts, testing the system on real touchpoints until concept 1, “simple and joyful”, held up everywhere.
The moodboard for concept 1, “simple and joyful”, inspired by Max Bill’s colour in service of usability. The print system that came out of it: menu, seasonal specials, a playlist tag and a “connect the dots while you wait” card.
Key decisions
Joy over artisanal seriousness. Bright colour and humour set the brand apart from the earthy, crafty look of most bakeries and breakfast spots.
One badge, many jobs. The ticket-shaped logo badge doubles as a price tag, a flavour label and a repeat pattern, which keeps the system small and recognisable.
Let the bread do the talking. Close-up photography of real bread and butter does the appetite work, while graphics stay flat and simple around it.
Launch posters, with a repeat pattern built from the logo badge.
Butter jar labels with one colour per flavour, and the menu printed on kraft paper.
Reflection
Working through a full brand sprint before touching any visuals made every design decision easier to defend. The hardest part was restraint: with a product this simple, the temptation to over-design is real.
Available for new projects