3FE – Coffee Cards

3FE have created a market for speciality coffee in Ireland that few knew existed, extending their business from a café to a roastery in recent times. The 3FE roastery produces hundreds of blends and single origin coffees in a year. We were set the challenge to reflect how special each one is, and to give some more information about where each coffee came from and what taste and feel could be expected from it.

We devised a system which generates unique coffee cards. The form is modelled on cigarette cards which were ubiquitous from the late 19th to mid-20th century. This spoke to the fact that we wanted the outcome to be easy to collect and to imply collectability.

The front of each card carries a unique symbol, generated from an array of 67,500 possible outcomes. The whole process is managed directly by the 3FE team. The system outputs print-ready PDF artwork to a queue. When the total in the queue hits a predetermined limit, artwork is sent directly into production. The reverse of the card carries more information about the coffee along with taste notes.