Desert Kid Coffee brings the wild beauty of the Coachella Valley to life

I've never been to the Coachella Valley, but I've heard great things. People say the light is incredible. Especially how it hits the mountains at dusk, and transforms the sky into a deep, dusty violet. You can understand why you might miss it if you'd grown up there.

Katie Reed and Joseph Eccles spent their childhoods in the area. Where I explored the quiet Cheshire lanes and ran across farmers' fields, they explored dunes and mountain trails. Like many of our generation, they eventually headed out into the wider world: Katie into tech, and Joseph into education. But the pull of "home" can be strong, and brought them back. With them, they brought city café culture and wanted to open their own spot. And its identity had to be something that honoured their roots.

They approached New York studio The Working Assembly to create the brand for Desert Kid Coffee, the new café and roastery that opens in Palm Desert this week. The brief was simple: use the desert as the source for everything. "The desert already has such a powerful visual language — the colours, the light, the shapes of the mountains," says founder Jolene Delisle. That meant ignoring the usual visual cues of European café culture or urban coffee brands, and taking inspiration from this particular patch of Southern California.

That commitment runs through every element of the identity. There's an illustration system that features the Coachella Valley's most distinctive icons, like the Cabazon dinosaurs or delicate hummingbirds. Purple sunsets and the rugged outline of the Chocolate Mountains, too. The typography feels raw but grounded, meanwhile. The logomark has soft edges that hint at the dirt from the desert itself. The palette is warm and muted: oranges, purples, blues, yellows, greens.

The studio worked across every touchpoint: brand strategy and naming, visual and verbal identity, illustration, web design, and the environmental design of the café itself — a generous 5,000-square-foot space.

There's a broader story here, too. An independent café opening in a spot better known for temporary spectacle says something. Coachella is globally famous for its events, but they're all temporary – they arrive, they dazzle, then they move on. Desert Kid Coffee reflects something quietly happening elsewhere: the people who left their hometowns to seek adventure in the cities, returning to their roots and bringing a little of that urban energy back with them.

The café mirrors the graphic identity throughout, so that walking into the room and picking up a cup both feel like the same experience. Architecture, storytelling and graphics all trace back to the same source – a coherence that's harder to achieve than it looks.

"The Working Assembly helped the entire experience of Desert Kid Coffee to feel like it grew directly out of that landscape," say Katie and Joseph.