Less Waste Coffee by Savannah College of Art and Design

In the US alone, we throw away 400 million paper coffee cups a day. That’s the equivalent of the volume of 13 Empire State Buildings of waste.

In response to this staggering issue of waste, I initiated a project to visually convey this data. With meticulous craftsmanship, I carved a coffee stamp and used it to hand-stamp 5,333 impressions on recyclable paper, yielding 13 Empire State Building images that tangibly represented the waste volume. Allowing the process of making to come through and bring materiality into the design.

These hand-stamped buildings were then digitized, paired with a rugged typeface, and transformed into a 13-poster series to be displayed in a coffee shop to raise awareness to our culture of waste.

Additionally, this data visualization inspired me to design a logo using a stamped coffee cup image and develop an entire design system. This comprehensive system, encompassing merchandise and packaging, was created for a fictitious New York City coffee shop advocating for a more sustainable coffee culture.