Happy Cakes is a fictional bakery I designed as a branding exercise. The brief I set: handmade but not old-fashioned.
The logo is a smiling cake slice. Simple enough to stamp on a napkin, friendly enough for a neighborhood shop. In the wordmark it takes the place of the E, but its line looked thin next to the letters and the word read "CAK S", so I drew it heavier.
The contrast that makes this work: warm type paired with stark, almost industrial photography. Close-ups show hands kneading dough, frosting being piped, and a layer cake topped with blueberries. The photos treat baked goods like design objects.
A bold sans-serif for 'Happy Cakes' signals modern; a loose script for taglines keeps it human. For headings I cut the ends of the A, E and Y in Motley Heavy at the same slant as the slice's bottom edge. Under the wordmark I set the word bakery in spaced capitals of Motley Medium, a lighter weight of the same face, so the word and the wordmark read as one logo.
The blue-beige palette ties everything together across social templates, packaging, and menus.
In motion the flat drawing looked stiff, so I rebuilt the slice in Cavalry as a 3D wedge that matches the drawing when it stands still. It says hello, turns shy, hops and spins, and its face stays on the cut side the whole time. It also winks and giggles, and when it gets sleepy a cup of coffee pops up to wake it. The first hops snapped off the ground, so I smoothed the movement until the bounce looked soft.
For the packaging I placed the logo kit into photo mockups in Photoshop and recolored each scene in the brand's blues and beige. The box lids carry the wordmark, and the seal stickers a round stamp with the slice cut out. A heavier slice I drew for tiny sizes looked oddly thick on the stickers, so they use a lighter one.
