Coffeebar offers four core coffees sold in their cafes every day. Their fourth core coffee, Trailhead, was introduced to the lineup in 2020. My challenge for this project was to create a coffee bag label that fit with the other three existing core coffee bag designs, while still making it my own. Drawing inspiration from the endless trails near me in the Lake Tahoe area, I created this outdoorsy design unique to the Truckee area. I opted for bear paw prints as a nod to the black bears that roam the area, and the topographic map detail in the background is an actual topographic map of downtown Truckee. The dotted line represents a trail, but also I-80, the highway that goes right past the very first Coffeebar cafe.

A year later, we released an instant coffee using ground trailhead coffee beans. I created a wrap around sticker with a front, side and back design.

Photos by Kellie Sasso

My very first project at Coffeebar was to design packaging for their tea. I love the bright Coffeebar color pallet, and wanted to represent each tea with a color that related to it’s tasting notes. To design this within the budget, I created a sticker that wraps around the tin with a continuous design, but also has a distinct front and back.

Photos by Paje Victoria

Local Reno favorite, Coffeebar, wanted an exciting design for their refreshing cold brew. Pulling from Coffeebar’s roots, I wanted to create a design that was fun, and also paid homage to the history of Reno. Inspired by the retro downtown casinos, I chose to create a label with a vintage neon light feel, in signature Coffebar colors.

Photos by Paje Victoria

At the beginning of 2022, Coffeebar had the opportunity to take over a local Italian restaurant called Food + Drink. We slowly began to transition the restaurant to ‘DOPO Pizza & Pasta’ in keeping with Coffeebar’s Italian coffee shop roots. With a tight budget, I had the opportunity to design the branding for DOPO, and come up with a few creative ways to transform this restaurant into our own. From the logo and menus, to exterior and interior design and signage, I created an identity that reflected Greg’s (Coffeebar and DOPO owner) love for Italian food and our Burning Man inspired culture here in Reno.

To create excitement around new collection releases, I designed themed phone backgrounds for customers to download from the Pura Vida Website. Using the provided color pallet and collection assets, I used photoshop, illustrator and procreate to create the backgrounds. Downloads can be found here.

Pura Vida partners with different organizations throughout the year and donates a portion of their sales to each organization. I was tasked with designing a sticker for their 2024 Mental Health awareness box utilizing the color palette and mood board their art director provided. From the 3 sticker options, the ‘Kind to my Mind’ design was chosen to be included in the box, and the illustration and fonts from the ‘Keep Growing Keep Going’ sticker were added to the inside of the box.

Coffeebar worked with a local Reno distillery, Ferino, to create a high end coffee liqueur. I took elements from Coffeebar’s coffee bags and the iconic Coffeebar lion, Giuseppe, to design a sleek liqueur label that stands out on the shelves.

Photos by Jenna Sudlow

A gallery of personal, professional and freelance design work.

Every year in the spring, Mesa Rim Climbing Gym hosts a western themed bouldering competition. The name of the comp, Wah Send, is a play on ‘Washoe County’, where the gym is located. Other than the competition being western themed, I was given creative freedom, and wanted to keep the design of the logo rooted in the spirit of the west.

I was asked to design a lookbook for the 2019 Spring/Summer collection for Aventura clothing. Using a repeating grid, I created this layout to showcase lifestyle photos and product photos for the collection. The full lookbook can be found here.

If you take a walk down the granola bar isle in most grocery stores, you may notice how many sweet granola bars exist, but how few savory granola bars compete in such a saturated market. Irena Boostani, from the Lavin Entrepreneurship group at San Diego State University, realized this was a problem. She developed a granola bar that was both savory and nurturing but needed help developing the packaging and branding for her new bar and brand, ‘SAVO’. This project consists of branding and packaging elements that I thought best represented the story behind the brand, primarily from the umlauts above the 'a' that come from the client's Russian background, and culinary upbringing that ultimately led to the creation of these bars. The SAVO logo was meant to convey a nourishing, wholesome, and savory feel, while the packaging of the bars carried on this idea, and also aimed to pop off the shelves to stand apart from their competition.

This was a series of welcome emails I designed for Coffeebar. When a customer got a coffee and signed into the wifi, they received a series of emails that were delivered over a few weeks. Within the design constraints of GoGoGuest, I created these emails to both introduce customers to the Coffeebar Brand, and also promote different products and locations that we have.

In addition to their core coffees, Coffeebar imports and roasts coffee beans from all over the world. One of my favorite parts about working at Coffeebar was tasting and learning about each of these new coffees. Each bag of the Vertical Reserve coffee features a hand drawn illustration inspired by the culture of the country or region that the beans came from.

'Masks' was an exhibit held at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park that showcased masks from different cultures around the world (and my favorite design project from SDSU). For this project, I had to create a system of cohesive illustrations and a children's brochure for a very diverse group of masks. Because some of the masks were ornate, and some were very simple, I chose to trace over the images of the masks with a brush pen. The loose line of the pen allowed me to accentuate shadows and lines of the simpler masks, and give detail to the more ornate masks while keeping the integrity of each mask. From there, I scanned in each illustration, and added a color behind each mask to reflect the overall mood and tone of the exhibition. The brochure is meant to create a fun, interactive, and eduational tool for the children making their way through the exhibition.

In keeping with today’s brand standards, Greek U needed an update to their packaging method. The only packaging we had in place was a standard grey mailing bag with hardly any branding. In order to get more engagement from our customers, make our brand more memorable, and get customers excited about their order, we came up with an exciting packaging solution designed on a small budget. We used Greek U teal throughout, accompanied by a strong contrasting coral color to draw the customer’s attention to different call’s to action. We really wanted to get our customer’s to post pictures of their new Greek gear on social media to further promote our brand, so we had stickers, hang tags, and coupons inside the package to encourage people to do that. I also designed a thank you card to make the package seem really personalized, and an exciting un-boxing experience.

Neon Rose is a leading influencer and brand management agency based in San Diego, CA. They specialize in connecting brands and influencers in the health and wellness world. Neon Rose needed a roster of their influencers to show their brand clients, complete with Instagram analytics, and clickable icons to go straight to the influencer’s social media channels. My goal was to create a branded and contemporary portfolio that made it easy for companies to get in contact with the person that embodied their brand the best.

My passion for silversmithing and creating jewelry began in 2016. After taking a basic silversmithing course and the San Diego Gem & Mineral society, I knew that this was a craft I needed to pursue. During the pandemic I decided to invest in the tools needed to start my own jewelry business. From designing and creating jewelry, to ordering supplies, communicating with customers, branding and creating my own website, I wear many hats running my small business.

More of my jewelry can be found on my website ciararobillardjewelry.com