Frequency leads LOTIPA and ImaginaryFriend’s identity for a DJ’s matcha

Matchalita is a brand of high-grade ceremonial matcha, founded by DJ and artist Carlita. US-based creative company ImaginaryFriend came on board to lead the creative direction for its identity, while Brazil and Portugal-based design studio LOTIPA developed the graphic design system, extending it into motion. “There wasn’t really a moment where ‘our bit’ ended and ‘their bit’ began,” ImaginaryFriend’s Co-Chief Creative Officer Dave Brown tells us. “Matchalita started from something that was already a very real part of Carlita’s life. She travels constantly for music, moving between cities and time zones, and matcha had become part of her daily ritual – something she genuinely loved, sought out wherever she was and had developed a real point of view around,” explains ImaginaryFriend’s other Co-Chief Creative Officer, Daniel Bonder. “When we came into the project, the name, beginnings of the product and Carlita’s relationship with matcha were already there. Our brief was to turn that into a distinctive brand world.” Carlita has travelled to Japan to learn how matcha is made and to meet people who grow and produce it. Bonder notes that the trip reinforced “an important principle for the brand: the expression can be playful, contemporary and culturally progressive, but the product can’t be a shortcut.” “We saw the opportunity at the intersection of Japanese matcha culture and Carlita’s world of music, fashion and nightlife,” Bonder continues. ImaginaryFriend’s creative question was a simple one: “What does matcha look and feel like when it’s built for a generation whose day doesn’t necessarily run from 9 to 5?” “We kept coming back to the idea of frequency,” LOTIPA’s Founder & Creative Director, Antoniel Felaínne, tells us. “Matcha changes your energy; music changes your energy, and Carlita’s world sits right at the intersection of those two things. So sound felt like a much more interesting place to start than the obvious visual codes of tea.” LOTIPA’s Brand Designer Alex Monteiro notes that “the brand needed to feel equally at home backstage at 2am as it did making matcha the next morning.” The wordmark is a reworked version of Adam Ladd’s typeface Gopher Display. “We wanted something condensed, graphic and slightly utilitarian – almost like typography you might find on a Japanese product label crossed with an underground club flyer,” Monteiro details. Around the wordmark, the system uses three typefaces: Noto Serif KR for headlines, with Colophon Foundry’s DM Mono for subheadings and DM Sans for copy. Alongside the wordmark and those three typefaces, the identity has custom Japanese typography, built using Rasmus Andersson’s Inter as a base. “Rather than treating it as a translation that always had to sit politely underneath the English, we used it much more expressively – sometimes informational, sometimes almost as texture or punctuation,” Monteiro notes. “We deliberately didn’t create one sacred lock-up that had to appear exactly the same way everywhere,” Monteiro continues. “The English wordmark tends to do the heavy lifting in terms of immediate recognition, while the Japanese typography can change scale and function depending on the application.” LOTIPA turned the frequency idea into a waveform symbol, drawn from the negative of the ‘M’ in the wordmark. “What’s useful is that it isn’t really a logo in the traditional sense,” Felaínne explains. “It can expand, contract, repeat and behave almost like a piece of visual music. Sometimes it becomes a pattern; sometimes a little badge or signature; sometimes it takes over an entire object. That flexibility was important because we always imagined Matchalita extending beyond a canister. It needed to work on cups, cans and packets, but also stickers, merch, posters, events and eventually spaces. The waveform gives all of those things a shared frequency without having to stamp the logo everywhere.” “We didn’t want to make another beautiful object designed to sit quietly on a kitchen counter,” Brown notes. The packaging has simple forms, but typography, colour and pattern make those forms “feel more like cultural objects than traditional wellness products,” Monteiro adds. “Black and ivory are really the grounding mechanism,” he details. “They give us enough restraint that we can be much more aggressive with colour elsewhere.” Against that base, the brighter colours operate like different frequencies or moods. “Chartreuse obviously has a natural relationship to matcha, but we didn’t want green to own the brand. Flamingo, scarlet, violet and orange take it somewhere much less expected and connect it back to fashion, music and nightlife. There isn’t a rigid ‘orange means X, violet means Y’ system. It’s more about energy and context. A quieter product moment might be predominantly black and ivory with one hit of colour; a poster, party or social piece can turn the volume right up.” “The photography needed to feel like you’re inside Carlita’s life rather than observing a campaign about it – backstage, getting ready, travelling, friends around, cups sitting amongst sunglasses and headphones, flash photography, movement, imperfections,” Bonder explains. LOTIPA ImaginaryFriend Matchalita