Branding a Whole Food Restaurant
Sample Logo and Menu Cover for a Environmentally Friendly Restaurant
Jan 14, 2009
This Newbys restaurant is an establishment with a social conscience. The menu is produced from organic and locally sourced ingredients wherever possible. In the case of ingredients that are brought in from further afield, their ethical policy ensures that only fairly traded products are purchased. A program of carbon offsetting ensures that, at the very worse, they a carbon neutral footprint.
While run by young owners, there's no desire to slavishly follow fashion and they're keen to communicate their free spiritedness and fun through their brand.
Target Market
The values promoted by Newbys are cross generational and trans socio-economic class, though it should be noted that there is a widely held view that customers pay a premium for putting their ethical money where their ethical mouth is.
Font
The font choice for this is a loose handwritten face which helps promote a fun and easy going attitude. There's also a punning connection with the restaurant's values in so far as handwritten fonts are obviously more organic than traditional typefaces.
The actual font chosen in this case is called Handwriting Plain which can be downloaded for free from Abstractfonts. The original designer of this font is unknown.
The broad strokes of this font give it a more friendly feel than many of the freely available handwritten fonts, which can sometimes seem a little scrawly and messy. All good handwriting fonts can make the text have a personal feel and make it easier for viewers to connect with the message.
Color Scheme
It's about as big a cliché as one could hope for, but the text for this logo is green. Actually it's a gradient of two shades of green that helps to maintain a softness with the font. The text is combined with a simple leaf graphic that also has a gradient fill of two shades of green. The simplicity of the logo makes it readily suited to reproduction in spot color and in mono.
Picture
The imagery is a simple and naïve vector line illustration that has a child like quality. A pale gradient serves for the sky with a roughly drawn blob of yellow for the sun. The foreground is produced from three ellipses. The darkest green is overlaid with a blue filled ellipse, with a lighter green ellipse placed on top of that, the composition producing a stylised valley with a river running through it.
It's common to contrast a font used in a logo, but in this case using the same font for the short tag line further unifies the design and fits in with the child like feel of the piece.
Layout
At first glance the design feels quite full, but the Newbys logo enjoys quite a lot of space that helps the design feel quite loose and relaxed.
Conclusion
This is one big cliché from start to finish, but demonstrates how fonts and illustration can work together to form a very simple result and Graphic Designers may be inspired to take some of the points above and use them to create something more individual.
There are more solutions to fictional Newbys briefs linked to from Suite101's article on the Essentials of Graphic Design.
