Let’s face it, you may style yourself as the connoisseur’s choice for coffee, but a lot of your customers just want whichever form of caffeine will go down smoothest. The disciples of caffeine are many, so why not decorate your place like a temple with some tasteful iconography.
Yes, caffeine molecules are a design trend.
But wait! Before you jump on the band wagon, it’s worth understanding exactly what makes caffeine look like caffeine. If you’re going to go ahead with this then you need to do it properly. Get the structure wrong and everyone will start to doubt your brewing skills (well, those with a chemistry degree anyway).
The most recognisable images of caffeine are the displayed and skeletal formulae. You may have seen baristas adorned with these in jewellery or tattoo form. Popular as they are, these are hard to pull off well. Switched-on chemists may give you nods of approval, but for the majority you'll either prompt painful flashbacks to secondary school chemistry or look like you’re in the pockets of Big Pharma. Unless you want your customers associating your coffee with stinky solvents, seek an alternative approach.
Our choice is always the ball and stick representation. This one is recognisable enough as caffeine to those in the know, but inoffensive to anyone else. If caffeine had a logo, this would be it. To avoid strife with your interior designer, ignore the CPK colour scheme that chemists use to indicate elements. Coming up with a coherent colour palette that features red, blue, black AND white is quite a challenge.
We've collected a few cool examples of caffeine we’ve seen in design. For interiors there's repeated pattern wallpaper on Spoonflower. You can also use it in tableware such as heat-sensitive caffeine-patterned mugs by Boutique Science. The more adventurous types can try sculptural pieces. Case Study coffee in Portland, Oregon, made caffeine into a statement chandelier that hangs over the main serving area.
For those with a desire to crush the competition in the 'I know more about coffee that you' game, look no further than molecular orbitals. Most of what we think of as atoms is actually just empty space. How edgy.
With good design choices, caffeine molecules can form the basis of some excellent interiors. Just remember that you're a coffee shop, not a Breaking Bad set.
DISPLAYED FORMULA
The one with all the letters
Caffeine is a small molecule made up of atoms attached together by bonds. Each letter represents an atom and the lines between them are bonds. Getting all the atoms and all the bonds in the correct place is crucial to make caffeine the molecule that gives you that lovely buzzy feeling.
SKELETAL FORMULA
The one that reminds you of geometry class
The first thing to remember about skeletal formulae is that organic chemists are lazy. Their molecules contain so many carbon and hydrogen atoms that they’ve collectively agreed not to label them all.
BALL AND STICK
The one you'll actually use
Atoms are circles and bonds are lines between them. With no letters we don’t know which element is which. Luckily chemistry has the CPK colouring system to point the way. Carbons are black, oxygens are red, hydrogens are white, nitrogens are blue.
Organic molecules look slightly different in three dimensions. They try to arrange their bonds as far away from each other as possible as the bonds repel. The most efficient configuration for caffeine is not-quite flat thanks to those hydrogens.
MOLECULAR ORBITALS
The one where you're just showing off
Atoms are mostly empty space. If an atom is the size of a football pitch, the solid nucleus in the middle is only the size of a football. The rest is places you’re likely to find electrons whizzing about. Bonds aren't sticks either, they're where the atoms football pitches overlap.