Coffee Journal

Tone

Moody, warm, artisanal — the feeling of a dimly lit third-wave café at 7am, steam rising from a ceramic cup, the smell of freshly ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe

Target audience

Serious home baristas and specialty coffee enthusiasts aged 25–45 who obsess over grind size, water temperature, and bloom time — the kind of people who own a Fellow Stagg kettle and a Timemore scale

Design direction

Grounds & Glory is a journal that feels like it was designed inside a candlelit specialty café at closing time — warm, intimate, and unhurried. The canvas is near-black espresso (#0F0D0B), not a flat digital black but a brown-tinged darkness that feels organic. Cards lift off this surface in dark roast brown (#1A1510) with barely-there borders in a toasted umber (#2E2318). The hero accent is a hand-thrown ceramic amber (#C87941) — not a neon orange, not a golden yellow, but the exact color of a properly extracted espresso crema catching morning light. Typography pairs the editorial authority of Playfair Display for brew names and section headers (italic for tasting notes, creating a wine-list elegance) with the utilitarian clarity of DM Sans for all data, labels, and UI chrome. Tasting note chips use a muted sage green (#6B8F5E) for finish/aftertaste descriptors and the amber primary for primary flavor notes — a subtle color language serious users will internalize. Every photo is treated as a piece of art: full-bleed, edge-to-edge with a subtle vignette gradient at the bottom to let white text float over it. The overall feeling is Letterboxd's reverence for its subject matter applied to coffee — this is a place where people who care deeply come to document something they love.

Color palette

Typography

Headings: Playfair Display · Body: DM Sans

Design inspiration

Untappd, Vivino, Letterboxd