MORR Café
at 242 Upper Street – London
Two Nepalese, one Turkish — three friends who opened a café on Upper Street in January 2025 with a shared interest in specialty coffee and a kitchen that pulls from both sides of the Mediterranean. The name was already there. The brief was to give it a mark that could hold all of it without signalling any of it.
Every letter does exactly one thing.
Except the R.
The wordmark is drawn from scratch — no typeface adapted, no existing letterforms borrowed. Each character is built to a shared stroke weight and geometric logic: the M on two forward-leaning diagonals, the O a perfect circle. The consistency of line is what makes the name read without effort. At the sizes it appears most — on a cup, on a counter sign, at the foot of a menu — the mark holds as a single unit.
The R came from looking at Devanagari, the script used to write Nepali. The character र shares a structural logic with the Latin R — a vertical stem, an enclosed counter, a descending leg — but the proportions differ, and the leg terminates at an angle that is not quite Western. That angle is in the Morr R. It isn't marked or explained anywhere in the identity. The mark reads as a wordmark first. What it carries stays in the letterform.
Black and white was not a convenience — it was a commitment. The identity needed to project the same qualities the café does: directness, confidence, an absence of anything superfluous. Colour would have introduced hierarchy between the two founding cultures; the absence of it places them on equal ground. The palette is a statement about what Morr is, made visible before a single dish is ordered.
The menu system holds three distinct occasions within a single typographic logic. The weights, the hierarchy, the position of the wordmark — these remain constant. What changes is the register. A weekday brunch reads with density and purpose. An evening menu breathes differently, closer to a restaurant than a café. The system allows for that shift without the identity fragmenting. One mark, different moments.
The M earns its independence from the wordmark. Where the full four-letter mark anchors the menu and the counter, the single letter carries the identity at the scale of a cup, a label, a stamp. Its geometry is distinctive enough to function alone — the two forward-leaning diagonals are not a detail borrowed from another typeface, they are the mark's own logic, visible from the first drawn stroke. The monogram was never designed separately. It simply turned out that the M had always been capable of standing on its own.
The identity online
The website is where the identity has to carry a feeling, not just a mark. Morr is warm without being soft — three friends, an open kitchen, coffee taken seriously and a room that shifts from a bright weekday brunch to something quieter and more considered after dark. The site is built to hold that whole arc. Black text on an off-white ground, generous space, the wordmark steady at the top of every page: the same restraint as the identity, now setting a mood rather than sitting on a cup. A visitor should sense the place before they read a word about it.
The detail is where the feeling is made. Type carries most of the atmosphere: the menu, the story, the hours and the room are all set in the two weights that run through the print system, so the site reads as one voice speaking rather than a template filled in. Layout follows the golden section the studio uses across its own work — measure, leading and column widths drawn from a single ratio — which is why the pages feel settled at any size, from a phone in the queue to a laptop at a desk. Since it went live, the site has done the quiet work it was built for: more of the right people finding Morr, lingering on the evening menu, and booking a table before they arrive.
One mark.
No colour.
Everything in the letterform.
