Not every project we work on sees us on the ground level building a restaurant’s brand from scratch. A lot of restaurant brand experiences are already underway when we’re engaged. In those instances we’re tasks with building upon an existing brand to grow it effectively. Such is the case with Three Sheets in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Another Honolulu food icon was designed by Vigor. This time a food truck serving island-inspired burritos called Dos Locos. Vigor infused island imagery with classic Mexican-inspired design elements to create custom typography and illustrations that made this truck stand out and get attention. The designs pop with a vibrant color palette tying the entire brand together.

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Let’s start off the week with a little one. This brand identity was designed by Strohl. It’s an exercise in traditional, proven design treatments to create a classic brand vibe. The colors are rich and strong as well as the typographic treatments.

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The owners of former restaurant The Reserve knew they needed to make a change if they were going to draw people in from Baltimore’s Federal Hill neighborhood. Being just a few blocks away may seem like it’s not a big deal, but when it comes to choosing a dining experience it can be a deal breaker. They called in Chef Cyrus Keefer and Vigor to turn the tired restaurant brand into a reinvigorated experience. (Designed by Vigor, a restaurant branding firm)

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This is an awesome way of driving home a point of differentiation. Moe’s doesn’t use microwaves because microwaves ruin everything. They figured they’d just show it instead of say it. This is a great way for a restaurant to send home a marketing angle.

Thanks to @ZacCoffman for the tip.

This is just phenomenal. Even though it’s decades ago, the arguments for a new, strong brand identity and image remain the same. Saul Bass makes it impossible to say no to a change in logo for a company who feels they have too much equity to change. It’s a bit long, but super interesting. Thanks to Brand New for the tip.

You’ve been in operation for years. You’ve had ups and downs, but more recently it’s been a steady decrease and things are looking bleak. What do you do?

That’s exactly where Spice was when we began talks of change. The first step is to identify how you got in this position in the first place. More often than not, it’s a deterioration of the original concept due to knee jerk reactions when sales dip. Before you know, those knee jerk reactions create a disjointed concept that become diluted and spastic. That’s a big problem when looking to keep the ship from sinking. (Sound familiar? Let’s talk.)

With the problem in sight, you have pull back the onion layers and figure out what is the core concept? Does it still work? Does it need to change? With Spice, after a bunch of research and discovery, the answer was that the core concept could work if it were uncluttered, reinforced, then pushed to the market with conviction. Spice originally was a restaurant influenced by the style and flair of Miami clubs and restaurants. That could easily work as a full service restaurant concept in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but that only solved the issues with the dinner and evening hours. Lunch was still a failure waiting to continue sinking the ship.

The issue with serving lunch in a full service restaurant is it doesn’t tailor well to clientele short on time like most lunch crowds happen to be. So you have to change the game without losing control over the initial concept. We had to develop a way to serve a good lunch, quickly while supporting the overall them of Spice. Here is the resulting initial strategy:

(Pre-existing identity as cluttered, disjointed and off point as the concept itself)

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Who doesn’t love a great TV spot for your favorite restaurant? Remember the ones from “back in the day?” What about restaurant ads from other countries. Well, i found a few lovely advertisements that’ll make ya laugh and some that will send waves of nostalgia over you. None of them will make you hungry, but one may make you dance. Enjoy.

Be like a snake?

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Before you get all excited and click happy. It has nothing to do with me wearing, or not wearing a kilt, skirt or other piece of provocative apparel. Now that that’s out of the way, if you are still interested in reading a lovely interview and article on me, Vigor, and restaurant branding, head on over to UNKILTED and be sure to comment.

Special thanks to Alex at UNKILTED for reaching out and putting it together.

When designing any brand touch point, be it an advertisement, a menu, whatever, there’s a knee-jerk tendency to want to fill it all up with content. Designers usually bulk at this for good reason. Instead of ranting about the use of white space and readability, I want to take a step back and discuss the negative effects of “And.”

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