Logo design – café

The logo

Brief

This logo was created (along with the ‘stage one’ website) before the business was opened.

Eten was started by three chefs so food quality was going to be high. It would serve the usual café dishes along with more interesting daily specials. It was going to be friendly – more tearoom than hipster hangout. Budget was limited so furniture, crockery and decor were going to be secondhand and non-specifically ‘retro’. There was a wait-and-see approach to the business and branding. Once the café was established, there were plans to open in the evening with a more bistro-style menu. The logo was needed for signage, menus, marketing and website.

What I did

I prefer a logotype, particularly for something like this. The logo would be used in a variety of places at very different sizes. It would work better than a symbol with text on the outside signs.

I was resistant to using images associated with cafés: cutlery, cookery, food. It would be difficult to come up with anything original. I couldn’t find any ideas in the shape of the word or letters. The best idea I had was a forced-looking attempt at using a fork for the ‘E’.

I concentrated on the expressiveness of the typeface, focusing on the idea of friendliness. This suggested something ‘casual’ and probably curvy. ‘Smiling’ ‘e’s would help. It needed to be bold to be noticed and chunkiness also felt friendly.

Once I knew what sort of thing I was after I looked for a font. Now I might have attempted to draw it myself but, in the circumstances, buying a font was the cost-effective choice

I didn’t have to look far. I get news of new fonts in my email and Funkydori arrived when I was talking to Eten. I might have even been influenced by it all along. It was inspired by 70s poster fonts – so it was suitably retro – and it had plenty of fancy alternate letters to play with. It was also new so it would be original, for a while at least. I bought it to use as the logo. I later used it for headers on the menus and promotional material.

But perhaps I should’ve have done…

I was in two minds about using a capital ‘E’. ‘E’ is a bit unusual in script form so I went for neatness and readability. Wrong decision. The capital E would have been great – bolder and more attractive – and given (accidentally) the logo the suggestion of the shape of a corkscrew (which had not occurred to me).

See more of my logo designs here.