The Tazzarte Logo: Küsnacht, Vevey, and a Cup

In a small studio in Küsnacht, overlooking the Zürichsee, the Tazzarte logo took shape. Paired with Suisse Neue, a typeface from Swiss Typefaces in Vevey, it reaches across the country's language border — German-speaking Küsnacht, French-speaking Vevey — which is a small thing to notice and a Swiss one.

A Cup, Reduced

The mark centres on a cup, its handle a single curve. Below it stands Tazzarte — from tazza, Italian for cup, and arte, art — set in Suisse Neue. The colours shift with the context: yellow for warmth, black where the ground is light. Against deep teal it does what a mark should do, which is to be recognised and then get out of the way.

What the Logo Does Not Claim

It is worth being exact, because the collection depends on exactness.

The motifs are not ours. They are documented works of art — a wood engraving of 1797, a cyanotype of the 1840s, a woodblock print of about 1831 — held in public collections and named on every product page with their institution and accession number. Tazzarte selects and prepares them. It does not invent them.

The mugs are not hand-painted. They are fine porcelain, printed on demand at the certified production house closest to the delivery address. That is an industrial process, and a good one: it holds fine detail, it wastes nothing, and it means no mug is made before someone wants it. What the porcelain is for, and why it is not the cheaper ceramic everyone else uses, is set out in How Your Mug Is Made.

What is made in Küsnacht is the selection — which work, at what size, on which curve, and whether it still reads at arm's length on a Monday morning.

Suisse Neue

Suisse Neue comes from Swiss Typefaces in Vevey. Its clarity is the point: it supports Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic, and it carries the mid-century Swiss typographic tradition — crisp, purposeful, unshowy — without imitating it.

The Mark and the Name

Tazzarte is a trade mark registered in Switzerland, no. 824443, class 21, registered on 20 December 2024.

A logo cannot make an object worth keeping. What it can do is stay out of the way of the picture — which, on these mugs, is the only thing that matters.