Today, we’ll take a look at a food logo workup for The Grilled Cheese Company an trendy eatery and restaurant, and the step-by-step approach to creating their new logo, letterhead and business cards. The first couple of logos we pitched (above) had a nifty retro vibe going on - the illustrative style is reminiscent of 50’s era diner graphics (reminds me of old drive-in movie snack bar animations). Alas, as cool as we thought they were, the client was non-plussed, and wanted a more graphic interpretation. Without further adieu -

After ditching the illustrative logo treatment of the initial concepts, our designers worked up a series of shielded designs using cheese themed center graphics and several different font styles (above). Shielded logos are always nice to work with - all the artwork is self-contained so they’re a breeze to add to various color backgrounds. The aspect ratio of the design is square, so it fits practically anywhere and on anything. Logos with square aspect ratios also work well as embroidered logos on wearables - hats, golf shirts and the like.

We weren’t sure about the cheesy (pun intended) graphics, so we worked up a few text only versions, focusing on the G & C. The client, however, dug the round logos, so we worked up a variety of font choices and center graphics. The orange and red color scheme, selected during on of the earlier design rounds would stay with us for the duration of the project.

Once we had settled on a final logo, it was on to the layout of business cards. As I mentioned a few days ago, the business card is usually the starting point of a stationery design project. That’s generally where we finalize on the overall theme, and then port that to the letterhead and envelope. Also, because we’re working with such a small surface area, a design that works on a business card is sure to work on a letterhead based simply on the latter’s larger size. The converse is not necessarily true, and a great letterhead design might not lend itself to being crowbarred into a matching card.

Once we had settled on a business card final, it was a simple matter to set up matching letterheads and envelopes (below). Nice little restaurant logo, ending up with clean, uncluttered design work, far removed from the original illustrative concepts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under The Daily Logo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.