“A new way to do coffee, at Konjo Coffee we are working towards raising the social and environmental standards of the industry and conserving a region of paramount ecological significance. For years, we have been steadily developing a model of coffee production that goes further than simply ‘paying more for coffee.’ We are empowering communities, supporting new resilient sustainable livelihoods, and promoting the conservation of the second largest forest in Ethiopia, the Harenna.” We were tasked to develop a brand identity and packaging for export standard coffee Konjo.

Coffee
In the remote southern highlands of Ethiopia lies an ancient forest harboring vast tracts of wild coffee. Perfected by nature and imparted with fruity and chocolatey flavors and aromas, these are beans of superior quality. To capture these natural essences, we have carefully prepared each and every bean from source to cup. Experience it for yourself and taste the wild side of coffee.

Different directions of the logo was proposed; 1. inspired from the pattern of a tree log we created the ‘K’ out of it to create an icon. 2. Created an illustration of the goat as it is Kaldi’s goat who first discovered coffee. 3. This time emphasizing on the farmer Kaldi himself, we created an illustration of ‘Kaldi’ holding a goat. Finally it was decided to go with the simplistic typography of ‘konjo’.

Sketches of 'konjo' typography which later used with the icons shown above.
What we actually ended up doing is importing all meshes from Realflow to Blender, turn by turn, and animated the Render Visibilty of the meshes, so only one frame of fluid is visible at a given frame. Not the most effective use of memory, some .blend files were as big as 1.4GB. It worked for this case though