Logo Refresh for 2012

Lowell’s Restaurant in the Pike Place Market has been a Seattle institution for many years—about 56 if you’re keeping track. Lowell’s contacted me via a regular client of mine, Cactus Restaurants, which is run by two brothers who are actually the sons of the guy who owns Lowell’s (small town!). Turns out, the Brothers Cactus basically grew up in Lowell’s while their father ran the place, and it kind of makes sense to me now why they are such successful restaurateurs. The elder Cactus has long since handed over operations to a fellow named Mark Monroe, and he’s the guy I first met regarding the project.

I’ve been saying “no” to new work for over a year because I am actually that busy. But after listening to Mark Monroe tell me the history of Lowell’s and the market space itself—all the way back to the turn of the century—I became rather intrigued. There is a lot of history in those three floors, and to a designer, a lot of history means a lot of material to work with. There were old photos from the lunch counter days, and even a few back when it started as a coffee roaster and café. There were old guest checks, coffee coupons, and menus that listed the price of an omelet at $4.95. I began to see Lowell’s as a genuine piece of Seattle history, and I was quickly sold on the project.

Business cards featuring the original 1957 staff.

This was going to be a complete rebrand including a new logo, menus, postcards, advertising, signage, and the ever important website. Since Lowell’s has a captive audience of tourists throughout the year, one of goals was to make an appeal to locals. This was interesting to me, and while I had enjoyed breakfast at Lowell’s years ago, I really hadn’t been back since. It seemed a bit too touristy in my mind, but in actuality, it’s kind of a cool place and not a bad spot to grab a cocktail in the market. It’s one of those places that everybody knows but hasn’t been to in a while. Lowell’s will always be famous for its breakfast and will always appeal to tourists who can’t pass up the views—but a question arose: How can we make Lowell’s appeal to Seattleites too? Do people even realize there are three floors? One floor even has a fantastic bar serving decent cocktails with those amazing views. Does Seattle even realize what we have here? This became the beginning of our creative brief.

We zeroed in on a logomark rather quickly. I proposed a handful of options, but we were both drawn to a banner style logo that seemed rather timeless. Other options felt too period-specific, or too “Pike Place”, while the final direction felt at home in any decade and had a certain retro-contemporary feel to it (if that makes any sense). The original tagline for Lowell’s had been “Almost Classy”. There was some talk of letting this go for various reasons (too comical?) but I actually kind of liked it. But I also really felt that a strong part of the Lowell’s brand was the history, so adding the birth year of the modern incarnation of Loweel’s seemed like a way to give the tagline some context. Almost Classy Since 1957 says a lot. It’s lighthearted like the restaurant itself—but it’s also got staying power. Sure, Lowell’s is going to have fun with your visit, but they’ve been around. They know what they are doing.

Menu redesign.

From there we redesigned the menus, created a postcard guest check holder that guests could take with them (and they did, we had to do a second 10,000 count print run by the end of summer) and we eventually created a new website from the ground up. For this project I knew I wanted to create a responsive design that could tailor both content and graphics to whatever device the visitor was using. More and more websites are being accessed via phones and tablets, and with such a large tourist base, an efficient serving of device-specific content became a major goal. Unlike the shoddy, secondary “mobile sites” you see a lot of companies trying to sell to restaurants these days, a true responsive design is a single site that recognizes the device it’s being viewed on and optimizes content accordingly. You don’t suddenly realize you are on a “mobile version of the site” because you aren’t. One site serves all.

Responsive website design.

I brought in my pal Ryan from Crashpad Design to work on the code and production and he did a great job with my concepts. Taking on responsive design like this is almost like designing 3 or 4 sites at once, and there are certain challenges to making it all work—especially when designing on the fly like I do. I threw a lot of different hurdles at him and Ryan did a great job. In the end, a great balance of visuals and content as the site scales.

Some website photography.

After a few photo shoots the site was soon ready to go live. I gave Mark the keys to the blog engine and he hasn’t taken his foot off the gas since. Great to see somebody so committed to the voice of a restaurant. Check out his blog when you can. (I need to tell him to lighten up on the multi-colored typography at some point! Or not.)

And when you do get a chance, go visit Lowell’s again. It’s probably been a while. Tell Mark that Geoff the designer guy sent you.

After spending a few years teaching English at a University in central Thailand, I returned to Seattle well-tanned, penniless and in desperate need of a job. This was late in 1998. After a brief stint working for Wolfgang Puck(!), I ended up waiting tables for a Vietnamese restaurant that had just opened the previous month. It was called Monsoon. I ended up working there for almost four years as I tried to get my design career back on track, waiting tables a few nights week while teaching myself web design between shifts. I had been working in the industry since I was old enough to drink, but as it turned out, Monsoon would be my last restaurant job—well, relatively speaking.

First Monsoon website, circa 2000.

But, before I was lured away to work in a big, fancy graphic design agency, I had the pleasure of really getting to know Vietnamese cuisine (and wine) working for Eric and his sister Sophie. And, I got to moonlight as a web designer all the while. Monsoon’s website was the first restaurant website I ever designed—and probably one of the first chef-owned restaurant websites in Seattle. I did the entire project in trade for two bottles of Zind Humbrecht Pinot Gris.

After I left Monsoon to get that “real job”, I continued to build websites and do graphic design work for Eric. I probably designed and built around five different versions of Monsoon’s web site over the years (and yet another in the works currently). Several years later I finally decided to quit the agency world to run my own design business. Right around that time Eric told me he was finally going to start building the noodle house we had been talking about for years. I was excited. A new place! A new name! A new logo! It was all going to be created from scratch. Perfect timing.

Eric decided to name his new place Ba Bar. Ba means “father” in Vietnamese and Eric’s dad had just passed away. This restaurant was going to be dedicated to the elder Banh himself. Eric told me stories of being a kid in Saigon, eating street food with Sophie and their father, sitting on tiny stools and slurping noodles in the crowded marketplace. He wanted to bring that very feeling to this new restaurant. He wanted to keep it casual and keep it fun. This wasn’t going to be a down-market version of Monsoon, it was going to be something completely different. Simple food inspired by the streets of Saigon—with cocktails. My kind of place.

Tagline: Street Food & Cold Drink

So I spent some time with Eric’s ideas and I came back a week later with some logo roughs and a tagline concept: Street Food & Cold Drink. Eric and I have understood each other pretty well over the years, and I could see his eyes light up. Street Food & Cold Drink! That was exactly what he was after. The concept was born.

The rest of the Banh family needed some convincing, however. Nobody quite understood the missing “s” on Drink and they were worried that Americans would think we spelled it wrong. It took some work, but I convinced them in the end (I think). It helped that Eric understood it from the beginning. The other hurdle was the idea of Street Food itself. People in the west tend to think Street Food means food served out of a truck. While in Southeast Asia, street food is food served roadside or in busy markets by some of the best cooks you can find. It’s more like fast food—but really good fast food. (Side note: One of the first critics to review the restaurant made this very observation—that Ba Bar wasn’t really street food because the food wasn’t “portable”. Which goes to show what little food critics actually know about South East Asian cuisine.)

Logomark illustrations.

For the logo itself I brought in illustrator and good pal David Cole to help come up with some drawings of the mark. I really liked the idea of using a simple, graphic illustration of Eric’s father’s face, but not everyone could agree on the appropriateness of using the elder Banh’s likeness as a logo. Next, we tried a guy bent over a bowl of noodles sitting on a tiny stool. (If you have ever spent time in South East Asia you will understand this visual.) That got a bit more traction, but in the end, we decided to keep the mark simple and opted for a straight typographic solution. The biggest challenge was to make sure the logo read as Ba Bar not Babar, as we didn’t want to be confused with a certain French Elephant. So stacking the type seemed crucial. There’s only three different letters in the name, so that was challenging, but I think it worked out really well in the end. It’s not too repetitive visually and it reads Ba Bar as much as it can. I still ended up using the illustrations that Dave created in some of the collateral, but the main logo became the name and tagline in a circle.

Logos in the wild. Neon sign and menu clipboards.

From there we rolled out laser-etched menus boards, rubber-stamped napkins, a giant neon sign, window graphics, jam jar labels, a website and much more. I’m especially happy with how the website turned out. We really wanted to make it fun and semi-educational by highlighting certain dishes and and explaining them in detail. We are planning to expand this kind of content moving forward.

Website pages.

If you live in the Seattle area you should stop by Ba Bar for a bowl of soup or a cocktail—and a grab a macaroon on the way out. It truly is a fun place, the vision paid off. And Ba Bar makes the best phở in town without question. You might even find me at the bar hanging out with Eric, talking about the good old days when he could still boss me around.

Check out the website at www.babarseattle.com and view more of the design and photography in the portfolio.

The Collaboration

Fast forward to the future (early 2011) and Marc contacted me again to discuss a new website and ultimately a brand refresh to coincide with the opening of a new Cactus location in South Lake Union. This sounded like a perfect fit for the business I had just started a year earlier. My goal has always been: to offer soup to nuts design for restaurants (I just trademarked that BTW). But sadly, I was buried in work. Too much work in fact, so I told him no. I recommended some other, bigger firms in town, but in doing so also told him that he would likely pay more and get less with a bigger firm. My way of keeping one toe in the door I guess.

A week later he emailed back and asked me to work on his project again. Due to my sinister workload, I should have said no a second time, but the project sounded really challenging and fun, so I started looking for a partner to help out on the print side. My plan was to get someone to collaborate with me directly on the brand refresh, then set him or her loose on the print collateral while I worked on the new website and gathered photography. Nikki Cole Creative agreed to join the effort, and we pitched the idea to Marc and his brother/business partner Bret. In early summer of 2011 we started work on the new Cactus Brand.

The Old Brand

Cactus Restaurants has been around since 1990. They started out small, cooking tapas at their first location in Madison Park. The logo itself had been updated a few times, but the overall look and feel of the brand was made up of a lot of different parts over the years and it was becoming unfocused and disjointed. Another problem was how they displayed the name ¡Cactus! by using the traditional Spanish punctuation. With the advent of all things iPod and iPad people began to mistake the name for something related to the tech industry: i-Cactus. This was eroding trust in a brand that really wanted to stay humble for the most part. It reeked of bad marketing decisions by no fault of their own. (Blame Steve Jobs).

The old Cactus website and logo

Something else I noticed in talking with them is the notion of Southwest Cuisine itself. What was once a hugely popular cuisine in the 80s had been slowly pushed to the back burner in favor of more traditional Mexican or Taco Truck style restaurants. But Southwestern food is actually great, so why do people downplay it? I wanted to explore this. I used to work in the agency world and often brand strategists would say things like: “Company X needs to own the color red.” I always found that to be kind of a ridiculous statement. How do you “own” a color? What the brand people really mean is: “Pick a color and use it a lot”. But, in thinking about this more, I really started saying to myself that Cactus should indeed “own” Southwestern cuisine. It really is a good differentiator for them in a market that is full of so many Mexican restaurants. Cactus does great Mexican, but the Southwestern stuff is really where they can make a statement.

The Brief

The creative brief for the logo was pretty simple. We wanted something a bit more modern and also a bit more sophisticated. This was driven by the new South Lake Union location which was going to be different stylistically from the previous Cactus restaurants. But, we also wanted it to work well at the older locations too, so it couldn’t be too slick. It needed some texture. And really, what we heard the most from Marc and Bret about Cactus is that they want the restaurants themselves to make you feel like you are on a vacation. When you dine at Cactus you should feel like you are taking a much needed break, enjoying a cocktail on the beach, relaxing. The brand needed to communicate that somehow.

The New Logo Direction

We explored a lot of different directions over the course of a month or so. We had cowboys, saguaro cactus arms, cactus flowers, Navajo cave paintings, type solutions pulled from old Mexican signage, and a whole lot more. We presented six solid options with a lot of variation. After the first meeting we had narrowed it to 5. (Not what we had in mind!) But, we liked them all too, so we went about refining the various options and incorporating feedback from the guys at Cactus.

Early rough design options

In the end we all decided to go with an option we were calling Mimbres. The idea for the mark was based around a style of Native American pottery found in what is now southern New Mexico. It offered us an opportunity to actually create four distinct marks, one for each of the Cactus locations. (This increased our workload fourfold, but we felt it was worth it.) Nikki did the illustrations herself, borrowing a bit from the Mimbres art, but in the end she really made them her own and incorporated abstract representations of cactus plants and flowers in each one. What’s great about the logo marks is that they are born from a marriage of Soutwestern folk art and cactus plants—but without being obviously cactus plants. The Saguaro cactus arm was really something we wanted to avoid (think Taco Time). So for instance, we used a top-down view of a barrel cactus for South Lake Union but the shape also works without that meaning as a stand-alone motif. Even better still, it could also be a lime wedge on the rim of a cold margarita. We ended up with a lot of room for interpretation which really made the whole identity system shine.

Mimbres illustrations

Color & Texture

Next we added color and texture. A lot of this came from photos Nikki had taken during a recent trip to the Yucatán. We were all really drawn to the bright colors washed over textured walls and this would later inform the collateral and the website as well.

Nikki's Yucatán vacation photos

Final Logo

Some various logo versions

Website

While Nikki began producing new menus and collateral, I switched gears and began creating the new Cactus website. We wanted something bright and sexy, but function was equally important. With four different locations this can get tricky, so there had to be clear paths to the stuff people wanted most: hours, directions and menus. All the while keeping the user oriented to the individual locations themselves. The rest was easy. We had so much material to work with following the branding phase of the project, that the look and feel fell into place rather quickly. A good argument for finding a print designer who is also your web designer!

Website

The Next Phase

This project was really fun. And fun because Marc and Bret Chatalas are great people to work with. They provided great feedback and brought a lot of good thinking to the process. And, they knew exactly when to be involved and also when to jump out of the way and let us work. I’m looking forward to a long working relationship with the brothers at Cactus. (We even designed a fifth logo mark just in case they get curious about new real estate.)

In the end, I’m glad Marc decided not to take my advice and find a bigger firm to work with. I haven’t had a day off since last summer, but it was well worth the effort.

Join me at Ignite Seattle 14 for a fun-filled five minutes of food porny discussion. The show starts at 8PM at the King Cat Theatre. Wednesday May 18th. Get there early as it fills up fast.

Meet me for cocktails after or before. Maybe during.

Imagination Hardware Website

My good pal Dave of David Cole Creative started a new venture last year called Imagination Hardware. He basically makes kits and games designed to educate and entertain people of all sizes by encouraging them to make stuff. His first product was a DC motor kit that you build yourself. It’s a DIY puzzle of sorts, and when all is said and done you have a working motor and and better understanding of why it actually works in the first place.

Soon enough, Dave was selling a good amount of the kits and he didn’t really have the proper bandwidth available to put together a real website. I didn’t really have any bandwidth either, but for some reason I decided to turn the whole project into a challenge: build a working website from sketchpad to launch in just three days. It almost worked too. I’d say when all was said and done we were getting pretty close to the fifth day.

My favorite part of this experiment was that I spent most of my creative time in the sketchpad down at the corner coffee shop, and this step has now become a key part of my workflow. With no computer at my disposal, I was forced to sketch and think and write. I’ve always done a lot of sketching on projects, but getting out of the office does something different. It makes your sketching deliberate and focused but it also taps into a different level of thought that isn’t available to you when you are surrounded by easy answers. (Google, book shelves, etc.)

Rough sketches from the coffee shop.

And when it came time to execute, I jumped right into the HTML/CSS and skipped over my typical Photoshop phase. I used Photoshop of course, but there was never a fully-formed Photoshop composite of the site available before I started writing code. I basically jumped back and forth between the sketchpad and the text-editor and then created Photoshop graphics “on demand” as I moved along. And it worked great.

All of this was made possible because Dave trusted me of course. He knew going into it that he wasn’t going to get to see much before it took shape in the browser—and he was perfectly okay with that. This approach probably wouldn’t work in every situation, but it sure was fun to just go and not spend a whole lot of time nudging pixels around.

The other great part of this assignment was the copywriting. Dave created the Imagination Hardware brand himself: the logo, the packaging, the visual vocabulary—everything about it was already in place. So I got to bring some new ideas to the table via the copy. This resulted in a tagline of sorts: We make stuff for people who like to make stuff. This came about during the coffee shop sketch phase and I really like this point at which design meets content. Quite often on the web, designers work around copy and treat web design as a way of building content containers that will (hopefully) get filled up with magic words at a later date. When really, content and design should always work together to inform each other. “Headline Goes Here” is usually the beginning of a mediocre website.

Anyway, this project was mostly a self-imposed challenge, but more importantly a fun way to help out my pal. (He returned the favor with some illustration work a few months later.) In the end, I learned a new way to tackle web design projects (skip Photoshop, mostly) and the site just got nominated for a 2011 Seattle Weekly Web Award.

Check out Imagination Hardware and pick up a Monster Kit. Tell them Geoff sent you.

Lagana Foods Website

Well, time does fly. Since my last post I’ve launched a few sites, shot a bunch of new photos and even managed to sneak a logo or two in there. Here’s the run-down:

Lagana Foods
Not only do people often think that Ethan Stowell and I are the same person, they probably think we spend a lot of time together with all the work I do for his company. While we do hang out from time to time, for this project I actually worked more closely with his partner, Kaela Farrington, on a new website for their specialty pasta company: Lagana Foods. During the discovery process we spent several hours drinking Negronis and snacking on smoked mackerel before we decided we didn’t really want to do the usual website design. That led us to the top-down pasta pile photo shoot which quickly became the obvious choice for a homepage. The rest flowed from there. I really like how this turned out.

Check out Lagana Foods and if you are in the Seattle area buy a bag of pasta. It’s really good stuff.

Spring Hill Website

Spring Hill
This project was more of a design refresh than a complete redesign. The old design still looked great, but the navigation needed a big usability upgrade and we needed to find a better way to show off even more of Mark Fuller’s amazing food. But sure enough, by the time I got into it I ended up re-writing all of the HTML and CSS from scratch. (Four years of out-dated code gathering dust.) This new version is much simpler to use and to maintain—and it looks pretty good too. A good argument for a realign vs. a redesign. The old website is still in there, but now it not only looks better, it’s actually more in tune with what Spring Hill’s customers wanted from the site.

Spring Hill is still one of my favorites. As a restaurant site it’s a great combination of food-pornery and information accessibility.

Book Bindery Website

Book Bindery
This project was quite comprehensive. Over the course of a year I worked on the Book Bindery logo, then the menu design, and finished off with an interim website. Eventually as the space itself began to take shape we crafted the complete site that is live now. All throughout the design process I stopped in for various photo shoots of the space, the food and even the pressing of a Columbia Valley syrah.

The Book Bindery is a great new restaurant situated on the banks of Seattle’s Ship Canal. It’s run by Patric Gabre-Kidan and Mike Almquist who also runs the winery and distillery next door. Chef Shaun McCrain is the guy behind the food and he’s doing some pretty incredible stuff.

Check out the Book Bindery. They are taking it to the next level in all areas.

Northwest Palate Cover & Spread

Northwest Palate
I recently provided photography for the cover and spread in a recent issue of Northwest Palate. Ethan Stowell again, this time digging for clams off Whidbey Island. These photos were actually outtakes from last year’s cookbook project. We all spent the weekend on Whidbey shooting photos, digging for clams, and drinking way too much wine. It was a spectacular time.

There’s a lot more work coming in the next few weeks. A local retail food company gets a brand refresh and website, another Northwest Palate spread goes to press, and my favorite new project this year: Eric Banh’s fantastic new noodle bar and cocktail lounge. This one is going to be great!

Happy Spring.

Logomark and Tagline

The year is coming to a close and I thought I better recap one of my favorite projects that recently wrapped up: Marjorie Restaurant. I’ve worked with Donna Moodie since the beginning of Marjorie back in 2001, providing various websites, photography, branding, and more. She lost her Belltown lease a couple of years ago and has since moved up to Capitol Hill and this was a good opportunity for us to update the brand and create a new website. We began rolling out new pieces earlier this year and I’m very happy with the results.

Website Homepage

Like a lot of my clients here in Seattle, the work I do with Marjorie is ongoing. We are continually creating new content, shooting new photos, and maintaining the web presence. So while the new brand launch and website are complete, the working relationship continues to grow. This is one of the best parts of running my own business: my clients become my friends and we get to extend the partnership indefinitely, thus allowing the work itself to evolve and improve. It’s a very agile working relationship and I think it’s key to the great success I’ve had so far this year. (More examples from this project in the portfolio).

Website Detail

And, what a year this has been! I just returned from a month-long working vacation in Thailand where I took a little time off to gather my senses and plan for 2011. I probably didn’t get as much work done as I anticipated, but the time was well spent. Here’s a few photos from the adventure.

Have a great holiday everyone, looking forward to what lies ahead…

Logo and Door Sign

Shortly after launching the new Ethan Stowell Restaurants website, we got to work on the identity for Staple & Fancy. Staple & Fancy is Ethan’s new restaurant in Ballard and is going to become the Seattle chef’s permanent digs. The restaurant occupies a newly renovated space in the Kolstrad Building and a lot of the original brick signage still occupies the walls. One of the former occupants was a grocery store that offered goods both staple & fancy, as the old painted sign on the brick wall states, and a restaurant name was born.

Daily Menu

For this logo assignment we went through quite a few rounds of revisions before landing on the final result. Trying to hit the sweet spot between old-timey but not too period-specific or hackneyed is harder than I expected. (Maybe in a future post I’ll show the giant pile of discarded attempts.)

In the end, the final logo seems like the perfect mix of old and new, and very appropriate for a restaurant which marries old and new architecture with Ethan’s simple and modern take on classical Italian cuisine.

Business Card

We came up with a simple business card based on a photo I took of the original signage. The menu was a concept we all came up with during a late-night brainstorm. (I’m sure the hosts are questioning the need for a staple gun to keep the daily menu current.)

Staple & Fancy

If you haven’t already, get down to Staple & Fancy and dine omakase style where Ethan takes care of all the ordering. Then simply sit back and relax with some of the best food in the country.

Cover

Late last year I was approached by Ethan Stowell to discuss a new project he was working on, his first cookbook. We had worked together before on a few of his websites, but this was going to be a big deal. And while I had shot plenty of photos for websites and a handful of magazines over the years, I hadn’t really taken on something of this scale—so I had to think about it. At the time I was working as senior interactive designer at an agency, so I was fairly concerned about how I was going to juggle a full-time job and a full-time book project.

So, I did the only logical thing: I quit my job. Granted, I had been entertaining this idea for some time already, but the book project was just the impetus I needed to start my own full-time business in one of the worst economies on record. And it was the best decision I ever made.

Watercress Salad + Fried Clams

We shot the photos over the course of a year at Ethan’s restaurants and we also spent two days on location on Whidbey Island where we dug for clams, cooked food, ate food and drank wine all night. It was a great time. I learned a lot. About Ethan’s food and about how to be a photographer. I should probably thank Ten Speed Press for taking a chance on a graphic designer with a camera—but luckily for me they have had success with this formula in the past.

How to clean an artichoke.

The cookbook itself is great. Ethan makes some of the best food I’ve ever had. Everything is simple, clean and delicious. You should buy this book. I’ve cooked from it myself. It works. And the photos aren’t half bad.

While LookatLao Studio has been around in various incarnations for the last two decades or more, it has never been my sole source of income. I’ve freelanced here and there and bummed around the world now and again, and I even moonlighted a bit during my time in the agency world, but I never tried to make LookatLao Studio a legitimate, full-time business that can pay the bills and then some. Until this year.

And so far it seems to be working out very well. Six months in to it and I’ve just received an award for Best Website Design: Restaurant/Bar for my work with Ethan Stowell Restaurants.

It has been a challenging kickoff and I have certainly learned that not having a boss does not equal more free time. But it has been worth it for sure. Like a former colleague said to me before I left my job: you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

So here’s what happened since January: I’ve launched websites for Ethan Stowell Restaurants, The Chef In The Hat, and Monsoon Restaurants. I worked on a logo for Seattle Restaurant Week with Lorie Ransom and refreshed a previous logo effort for Marjorie Restaurant. I also shot about 20,000 photographs for a cookbook that will be out in September–more on that one when the book is available.

And currently in the works are a couple of new websites, another handful of logos and I’m about to put together a pitch for another cookbook that I hope will take me and a talented chef to far off lands in search of food and photo opportunities. Needless to say, I’m staying busy.

I’ve updated the design portfolio with several new projects if you want to see more, and the photography portfolio will be updated next.

It’s going to be a busy summer!