How Tuman Studio made Ants Coffee’s rough identity feel intentional

Ants Coffee behaves like an anthill. People arrive on their own, settle in and, without anyone organising it, become part of something larger. It was that behaviour, rather than the coffee, that Tuman Studio took as the starting point for the family-owned coffee shop’s identity, building the brand on the way a crowd assembles itself. The New York-based strategy and design studio designed the logo, wordmark, typographic system, illustration, packaging and motion, applied across both of Ants’ Brooklyn locations. By the time Tuman came in, Ants had already existed for almost two years, so the community the identity would go on to represent was in place. “I don’t think the rebrand created the Anthill,” one of the shop’s Co-founders, Nia Odzelashvili, tells us. “It simply gave it a name.” A decade of hospitality experience and the relationships built around the shop had already shaped what Ants was, so the task was to bring that together and name it, not to reinvent it. The collaboration with Tuman had begun as a friendship long before there was any talk of branding, Odzelashvili adds, and “by the time we started working together, there was already a great deal of trust.” The logomark is built from the silhouette of an anthill – a rough, organic form with an uneven outline – within which the letter ‘A’ emerges and, looked at again, an ant. “We never treated those three ideas as separate symbols that needed to be combined,” explains Co-founder & Creative Director, Irina Kosheleva. “We started with the logic of an anthill itself – an irregular form built through many small actions. Once that shape felt convincing on its own, the ‘A’ naturally appeared within it, and the ant emerged almost as a byproduct.” Some people see the anthill first and others the ‘A’ or the ant later. From there the idea spreads outward, the letters themselves starting to look like ants.