Overview

Miyako (都) — meaning "capital city" or "place of beauty" in Japanese — sets the tone for everything this brand stands for. It's not loud. It's not trying to compete with the neon energy-drink shelf. Miyako lives in a quieter, more intentional space: the kind of brand you'd find at a boutique café or a curated lifestyle store.

The brief was to design a brand identity for a ready-to-drink iced tea that could appeal to health-conscious, aesthetically-aware consumers aged 22–35 — people who care about what they put in their bodies and how it looks on their feed. The brand needed to feel premium without being pretentious, Japanese-inspired without being a costume, and versatile enough to work across packaging, digital, and print.

Our Process

The process started with positioning. Before a single mark was drawn, I mapped out the brand's world — its references, its competitors, its whitespace. Japanese minimalism, vintage tea culture, editorial stillness. The moodboard pulled from everything: Muji's restraint, vintage Suntory packaging, Kinfolk's visual tone.

From there, the logo exploration centered on finding a mark that could carry both warmth and precision. The final wordmark uses a custom-refined typeface with subtle modifications that nod to Japanese typographic sensibilities — clean strokes, deliberate spacing, a quiet confidence. It pairs with a minimal icon system that works at bottle-cap scale as easily as it does on a billboard.

Results

Miyako Ice Tea is a spec project, but it was designed to function as a real, investor-ready brand. The identity system is fully scalable — from a single SKU to a product line, from a local launch to a national rollout. Every asset was built with production constraints in mind: packaging files are print-ready, the logo suite covers all use cases, and the visual system is documented well enough to hand off to a manufacturer or a marketing team without losing anything in translation.