Restaurant Logos and the Design Process

Food, Folks, Logo Design — Jeff Fisher serves it up

As a designer, I’m always fascinated by logos and how they’re created. As a fan of food, I love dining in restaurants and examining their identities for inspiration in my own work. It’s not often that I get to speak to, or hear from, the actual person who created the logo of my favorite restaurants, so when I saw this article at Creative Latitude in Jeff Fisher’s Logo Notions column about food and logos, I had to put down my fork and read it.

In Designs on dining: Restaurant logos as a graphic invitation to a meal and an experience,,Jeff Fisher discusses the process and considerations that designers use to accomplish their goal of producing a great identity for a delicious service or product. He speaks with four designers about the their past projects which include:

• working with one group of owners to come up with the perfect logo for a brewery only to have the place re-branded after a year by new owners,
• expanding on a mish-mash of collected images to come up with a cohesive identity that reflects those photos in look and feel,
• updating an award-winning identity to better suit a new clientele of hip and trendy youngsters whose eyes might be bigger than their wallets,
• learning to work with an owner who’s got an exact idea in mind and taking that concept through to completion while still imparting some of yourself to it,
• eating, drinking, and honeymooning your way through a project to get a better grasp on what the identity could become.

Throughout the article Jeff, Madelyn Wattigney (Creative Madhouse), Dan Stebbings (Fresh Oil), John Sayles (Sayles Graphic Design), and Tracy Moon (StudioMoon) all offer up fantastic advice on designing logos and working with clients. As in most cases, communication is KEY! Whether you see your client daily or have to communicate with them by phone, fax and email across hundreds of miles, keeping an open and clear discourse is the best way to insure a successful project and a happy client.

Jeff Fisher is a regular columnist at Creative Latitude and the Engineer of Creative Identity for the one-person design shop Jeff Fisher LogoMotives. Keep an eye on his Logo Notions column for more articles such as this.