I've always had a love/hate relationship with logo design. The hate part is usually because logo assignments typically land on my desk at the last possible minute and there's never enough time to go deep. This was the case when longtime clients Mark & Marjorie Fuller called me late one night and said they were changing the entire concept of their fine dining restaurant Spring Hill into something a little more casual and a lot more Hawaiian. What they needed was a new logo, menus, and a website overnight (well, over the course of a week, but you get the idea).
The plan was to convert the existing Spring Hill logo (which was designed by somebody before me) into Ma‘ono Fried Chicken & Whisky and my job was to come up with new typography and color to better represent the new direction with an obvious nod to Hawaii. The Hawaiian word ma‘ono roughly translates to "make delicious" and after playing around with Hawaiian color palettes and different letterforms, the end result looked something like this:
From there we moved on to websites and business cards and menus and all the rest. The clock was ticking, but we were making it work. Then, about a day or two before reopening, I got another call from Mark. "We screwed up the ‘okina." What the hell's an ‘okina?! Turns out, the apostrophe between many Hawaiian words to mark the phonemic glottal stop (MA-Ono) actually has a name (‘okina) and it's represented by the left single quotation mark—not the right. This is what happens when you don't have time for research! So we had to quickly change the logotype at the last minute to this:
I didn't really like the look of this new eleventh hour version, it just didn't feel right to me, but it was too late. We had to start printing menus and making signs. Not gonna lie, this whole thing made me a little sad. But, these things happen under duress, and we move on.
Fast forward a year or two later and Mark called me up again to work on some alternate logos for Ma‘ono that would be used for various pop-ups and concepts he was doing around Seattle. One was at the Rhino Room, another was a loose idea for a tiki cocktail lounge called Ma‘ono Sand Bar. So I went all the way back to the sketchpad and took another look at that damn ‘okina. And before too long I had a revelation: What if I worked the ‘okina into the negative space between the letters somehow? And, by golly it worked! After all that time, the final result is now one of my favorite logos ever. All it took was a couple of years to get there.
The Fullers were convinced as well, and all the old collateral was scrapped over time in favor of this new improved version. The logotype itself has even morphed into a new version that I’ve seen at the various fried chicken outposts in collaboration with Rachel’s Ginger Beer.
I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but perhaps it’s: when that thing doesn't feel quite right, it’s probably not. Maybe don't wait two years to fix it next time.
Anyway, go eat at Ma‘ono Fried Chicken & Whisky if you haven't already. Mark is one of the best chefs the Pacific Northwest has ever known. The fried chicken is revelatory—and don't skip the Spam Musubi!