Giving a restaurant with a very unique name some serious brand swagger

I can draw, but I'm not a natural illustrator. I'm most effective with a reference image, realistic shading, and graphite.

Loving to draw is one of the things that led me to design as a career in the first place, and my experience in drafting has given me some transferrable skills. One of those is a reliable process to produce illustrated brand characters.

Still, a personified onion was more than a little intimidating to me.

I started by researching other personified onions, but that search didn't yield many viable results. One one hand, that's great because there is little competition. On the other hand, there is also very little precedent to reference.

My research did yield some pleasingly-shaped real-world onions, though, so I started there. I used trash paper to iterate on the proportions until I had an outline I could work with, then I started layering more trash paper on top of that to riff on a face. I used contours in the onion I had used as reference to come up with an option:

The first result was pretty adorable, but not particularly atypical. He's pretty predictable in the context of onions as a staple of italian food. Back to the drawing board, or the light table, as it were.

This onion needed a very specific attitude. He needed to be fully aware that rust and onions might not be everyone's cup of tea, and unwaveringly confident that he could change that. I had drawn a character like that before. I had a band that used an illustrated cat as a mascott, and he had that kind of swagger. What if he hung out with an onion? What would that look like?

After many layers (no pun intended) of iteration, I arrived at a promising concept. The only problem was the eyes. He had snake eyes. Eyes are hard to draw, especially if you're not a skilled illustrator. Jimmy's son loved the onion, but requested that it be "less scary." Back to the light table.

After several more iterations, the onion was ready for prime time. Not only were his eyes less scary, but he had an expression of playful shit-talking that we were looking for — and even Jimmy's mom thought he looked a little like Jimmy. Score!

One of Jimmy's contracts for equipment provided for some free pizza boxes

Jimmy wasn't particularly excited about custom pizza boxes (opening a restaurant can be overwhelming), so he put the supplier in touch with me and gave me the go-ahead to see what I could come up with.

The specifcations required for printing on pizza boxes led to the creation of a simplified 2-color version of the logo.

The first option was…adequate, but honestly, I wasn't particularly excited about it, either.

The first idea for the pizza box

Then I had the good fortune to experience the lost opportunity of an unbranded pizza box

Generic pizza boxes cost restaurants with great pizza a lot of potential customers

We explored several options for the placement. Then, at a meeting with another client, they provided pizza and it came in a generic box.

I considered the lost opportunity of an unbranded box. What if the pizza was incredible, but potential customers had no way to know where to get more?

How many people discover a new pizza place at group gatherings where they didn't place the order?

Recognizing a primary customer journey for pizza as a largely overlooked opportunity led to more inspired designs.

New options featured the logo prominently, but also offered a listing of the other items on the menu:

A second iteration of the box that explores a more sophisticated orientation of the logo and adds text to describe the product offering

A third iteration of the box reverses the orientation of the logo to the text

The text is set in two orientations so a group of people crowded around the box can get a sense for the product offering at any angle without having to try to read upside down.

Interest in the new place in town was already mounting, and the final version of the pizza box ensures that everyone will know where that killer pizza came from

The finishing touch was to set some of the words in red to call attention to them. The QR code was placed in a more integrated location, but remained available as a helpful way for someone to grab the contact info for the restaurant on their way out of a gathering.

The final iteration of the box optimizes the box top for prime legibility and readability regardless of the angle of approach, and provides multiple avenues to get in touch with the restaurant

The menu is designed to serve as the in-house and take out menu, with energetic typesetting and use of the full brand color palette

A menu for a place that's "Anything but Typical" needs some surprises in the design

Jimmy and his team of consultants fully embraced the misson that the brand's tagline declared, and that excitement was evident in the menu selections.

A fun and energetic layout that called attention to the items with the best profit margins was a given, but how else could we set this menu apart?

I'd had several experiences at the diner where a comp or vendor quote had been set on a water ring from a drink, or fell victim to a sticky spot or a spill.

The truth is that most solutions for menus are either costly, wasteful, unsanitary, or all of the above.

Budget would be a necessary consideration post-launch, but reprinting cheap menus adds up over time, too. We needed a solution that would offer some flexibility and still be unique.

An easy-to-update beer and wine menu template that can be updated in MS Word by restaurant staff

Yupo paper would offer a lot of the charm that defines the brand: water-proof, tear-resistant, and a pleasure to the touch.

The trouble was that the menu would likely evolve frequenly in the first few months as Jimmy fine-tuned the pricing and the product offering. He needed to be able to print menus in-house until the offering was stabilized.

Not to brag, but my internet search skills are next-level. If it exists, I will find it

An epic search led to the sourcing of a paper stock with all the properties of Yupo paper, but for a laser printer. I brought a sample to the diner and encouraged Jimmy to try to destroy it. He was delighted with every failed attempt.

The menu design was rounded out with a simpler, black and white beer and wine menu that could be customized in house as needed. This provided another opportunity to use the horizontal version of the logo to help tie the outdoor signage in with the rest of the brand.

LED sign design for The Rusty Onion

When a new place is opening in town, there is a lot of interest and curiosity in the community. Jimmy was literally receiving a stack of business cards every day from vendors and people who wanted to apply to work at the restaurant. He was also splitting his time between the diner and the new place, and his time was a scare and precious resource.

Temporary Teaser Signs

To help ease the demands on his time, we created a couple of temporary signs that would provide passersby with more information. One was a reversible banner mounted to the front of the building with a message of "Coming Soon" on one side and "We're Open" on the other. The other was a vinyl cling that hung in the window. Both had a QR code that scanned to the website, where I had created a coming soon page that allowed visitors to sign up for email udpates and opt into the restaurant mailing list.

Temporary sign designs for The Rusty Onion. Two are for use prior to the launch, and one for use after the launch. Remember those drafting skills I was telling you about? Here's an example of where they come in handy.

I used Dlvr.it to track the usage of the code, and we saw immediate results. Jimmy did, too. He was able to suggest that folks scan that code for more information so that he could attend to all of the other pressing things on his to do list each day.

Once we had a temporary solution in place, it was time to begin work on the permanent signage.

The design of the building facade called for a horizonal logo, so I created a second version for that purpose.

It looked fantastic during the day, but the color palette was a bit subdued at night, so we added some green LEDs to backlight it at night.

Jimmy's team was lean, with him, his head chef, a restaurant consultant, the general contractor who was developing the interior, and me. We all saw how much responsibility he was carrying, and so we each played an expanded role throughout the process. For my part, I sourced vendors and price quotes for the design artifacts, and advised on the options. Jimmy has a lot of friends in town, as well, and he felt obligated to send business their way, so he'd often as me to get quotes from a friend, as well. For the sign, I created a blind comparison spreadsheet that compared what each vendor was offering so that he could make the best choice for his needs.

A long time client of mine invited me to meet with his friend, Jimmy. He was planning to open a restaurant and needed some help with branding.

He planned to call it The Rusty Onion.

The main demographic of the restaurant was single men ages 25 to 45, but Jimmy also wanted the brand to appeal to his 6-year-old son because he hoped to pass the torch to him one day and wanted to create a brand that his son would love from the start.

Sometimes, Jimmy would slide a small plate across the counter with an unusual pairing of food and condiment or the like, and he'd say "I know it sounds nuts, but trust me, you gotta try this. It's great!"

The brand direction was set, and the concept encouraged unique solutions.

Project Elements

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