When immersive storytelling elevates writing for design
From the moment you pass through the cafe doors, your story begins. You take a look at the menu and find each coffee introduced to you like the stars of the show. Picking up a napkin, you spot another snippet of a story, beckoning you to follow it down the narrative path. There is no end to it – you could stay in the cafe all day and chase a hundred more.
This is the work of For The People, who created an immersive and whimsical brand identity for Story, a specialist Sydney coffee shop – turning every space (from coffee cups to the underside of benches), into a blank page to write attention-grabbing stories. This project won a Graphite and a Wood Pencil for Writing for Design and a Graphite Pencil for Graphic Design. We caught up with Jason Little, For The People’s Creative Director, and Mathew Groom, their Senior Storyteller, to learn how they created an engaging brand identity around just the name of the coffee shop, ‘Story’.
Story Espresso, For The People
Start by world-building
Mathew Groom, Senior Storyteller at For The People, was perhaps the agency’s ace-in-the-hole for this project. He’s also a comic book writer - for Marvel, no less - and as such he is particularly well-versed in building out whole worlds for stories to exist within. “We wanted to do something about the substance of storytelling,” says Groom. “Not just books and literary ephemera dotted around the space – comprehensive world-building that’s filtered through all aspects of the design.”
For The People were able to look at blank spaces like coffee cups, receipts, loyalty cards, and saucers as opportunities to catch the customers’ eyes. “The associations between coffee and reading are already there,” Jason Little, their Creative Director, highlighted, “so we had the opportunity to take that further, and tell a story in every interaction.” Recurrent characters and motifs pop up throughout texts, rewarding repeat customers as frequently as first-time visitors.
With this task in mind, Groom was keen to demonstrate a personal belief of his – that humour doesn’t necessarily need to be the default option in brand writing. “Humour’s great, of course,” says Groom, “but so much more can be achieved. We wanted to combine humour with melancholy, excitement, suspense, and a sense of mystery.”
Story Espresso, For The People
The message should resonate with the brand
With a broader spread of tones and moods to aim for, Groom says, the For The People team found themselves working within a much smaller window of success. “When it’s a joke, you can tell it’s good if you read it out and get a laugh,” Groom says. “But we had to spend a lot of time drilling into the stories to get exactly what we wanted. It couldn’t be too saccharine, it couldn’t be too sad – it had to be just right, which was a challenge for us.”
Compounding this was a keen sense throughout the process that English was not the client’s mother tongue, and so extra effort needed to be made to ensure the sentiment and drive behind their stories would resonate with every customer. “We made sure to ask the client constantly: do you like this? Does this resonate with you?” says Little. “Because they had to get it. It’d suck for them if they didn’t, because it’s their brand and it’s what they want to build. It would be self-indulgent of us to work without that in our minds.”
Groom agrees. “We had so much trust and support from the client that it left us without excuses. We had to deliver, and understand within ourselves what constitutes good work. If you get too in your own head about the craft and the details, you’ll miss some of the fun and the simple pleasures that people actually enjoy – it becomes an exercise in massaging your own writing ego, which isn’t good work.”
Story Espresso, For The People
Collaboration is an exercise in empathy
Typically, the workflow of a project like this moves from desk to desk, passing through strategy, design, and writing, before arriving at the point of being presentable. Little prefers a different approach – for Story, the strategists, designers, and writers collaborated from the very beginning of research and insight gathering, so that everyone in the team had buy-in. “It may not be the most cost-effective way of doing things,” says Little, “but it makes sure that everyone is involved, and feels able to contribute.”
This integrated approach allowed For The People to navigate the innumerable tasks and tests of weaving stories into a physical space. Wrapping a choose-your-own-adventure story around a coffee cup is an interesting and novel concept, of course, but working within those space constraints was, in Groom’s words, “an immense technical challenge.” “If you don’t work very closely with the designer in question on exactly how that’s going to work,” Groom says, “you’ll hand over something that’s unworkable, and you will have failed the task. Speaking to our designer directly about our space constraints shaped the form of the writing itself.”
Work of this quality rises and falls on what Groom calls the team’s “connective empathy” – an understanding of everybody’s strengths and opinions, and an innate grasp of when to step back and let somebody else take the lead for a while. “Working without ego, essentially.” For Little, this meant deferring to Groom’s expertise on storytelling, and loosening his own conception of what the project should look like. “After all,” he says, “We’re all just trying to help each other be the best that we can be. He writes comics for Marvel – who am I to tell him what to do?”