LOGo
DESIGN

Duck Dive Bar & Grill

The Duck Dive is a local beachside watering hole here in San Diego. The original logo resembled more of an action sports logo than a logo for a restaurant, so the first thing I wanted to do was add food related elements into the design which would help with that aspect. Adding utensils and forming them into a duck was maybe a bit on the nose, but I liked it and I figured it would help make the restaurants brand even more recognizable, even if the Duck Dive name was not present.

SoCal Analytics

Analytics and numbers are not exactly my forte, but one thing I do know is data analysis involves charts and graphs (I'm guessing), so I wanted the logo to immediately remind the viewer of these two elements. This was a starting off point, but I also wanted to represent the companies southern California roots, so of course having the orange hues of our beautiful San Diego sunset circling the SCA acronym felt like a natural choice. I came up with two final designs but I couldn't decide which logo was better. The client also had a tough time deciding as well but in the end, the right design was chosen.

Ristorante Illando

A great restaurant located in Little Italy, the design process of this logo was one of the fastest I've ever been involved in. The owners wanted the dome of a Roman cathedral to be the focus of the logo, in front of a brick background. The request was fairly simple, so I did a quickly drafted first round with the intention of expanding on it, streamlining it and refining it further down the line. He ended up loving it immediately, and so here it is.

Scuderie Italia

A great restaurant located in Little Italy, the design process of this logo was one of the fastest I've ever been involved in. The owners wanted the dome of a Roman cathedral to be the focus of the logo, in front of a brick background. The request was fairly simple, so I did a quickly drafted a first round with the intention of expanding on it, streamlining it and refining it further down the line. He ended up loving it immediately, and so here it is.

Branding influence and inspiration:

Early Drafts

Final Logo

Sansui Japanese SteAKHOUSE AND SUSHI

I wanted to directly refer to traditional Japanese watercolor paintings, complete with canvas texture and brush strokes. This was a traditional Japanese restaurant, so I wanted to go for the aesthetic of a traditional Japanese painting. The font of SANSUI itself is very much not Japanese inspired, but a typeface normally used for a Broadway type of brand. However the font's thick strokes, along with the thinner swashes and hairlines of the letters, worked well in combination with the overall feel of the restaurant.

And then there is the logo mark itself, the multi-lined abstract design below SANSUI. As I was developing the brand, I doodled on a notepad everything sushi related I could think of; fish, boats, even water itself. I realized many of these illustrations were very similar to one another when broken down to their most simple, abstract shape. The repeating scales of a delicious tuna, the large ribbed sails of a traditional Japanese fishing boat, the shadows and ripples across the water during sunset. The all had a repeating, linear pattern to them that I felt I could represent with these 5 simple, clean strokes sweeping across the bottom of the restaurant's name. It's a simple and elegant icon that over time could be recognizable without having the word SANSUI anywhere near it.

Branding influence and inspiration: