IXD103 – One Week Branding Project

Research on Existing Brands

Little Wing (Local)

Little Wing is a Pizza restaurant chain based in Northern Ireland. They are well-known for their fast-served high-quality pizzas. The restaurant is particularly popular with young people, with their customers ranging from students to school kids, couples and families. Students also can take advantage of the 20% student discount that Little Wing are always offering.

The overall branding of this company is very consistent, following the same colour scheme and style throughout, and a logo that doesn’t change and fits in with rest of the branding design. The colours used to define Little Wing are a pale blue and a dark brown-red. The two opposing colours work well together in an almost monotone fashion, but the hint of colour gives the design a unique, memorable quality.

The menu offers insight to the illustrations the company uses. These sketch-like designs depict different objects relating to Little Wing, such as pizza slices, tomatoes and a cupid with a bow, an arrow and wings.

The hand-drawn illustrations, I find, are very charming, and add an element of authenticity and urbanism to the branding.

 

In terms of the box and packaging branding, the colour scheme and logo remains consistent, but instead of using their same technique of hand-drawn illustrations to decorate their products, they have instead used an edited photograph of a car, with the number plate ‘PIZZ4’. I like the look of it, but I think it falls short of consistency with the rest of the designs.

The actual logo for Little Wing itself is made up of boxed letters of varying fonts, with the box being that same dark red-brown and the lettering and background being the pale blue from before. I like this design for what the company is trying to portray in it – it is very unique, and brings across the message that the pizza they serve is different to anyone else’s, and appeals to younger audiences.

Domino’s (Global)

Domino’s is an American multinational pizza restaurant chain, formed originally in 1960. It is the largest pizza company in the world, with more than 17,000 stores in 90 countries, including 31 within Northern Ireland. The logo for Domino’s is internationally recognisable, due to its simplicity and timeless design. It appeals to all ages, as it is both fun and sophisticated.

The logo consists of two bars of contrasting colour – red and blue. The blue bar, at the bottom, contains the company’s title, ‘Domino’s Pizza’. The red bar sits on top of the blue bar, making the overall shape into a square. The red bar is split into two with a dividing white line in the middle of it, and on one side of this line are two white dots and on the other only one dot, imitating a domino piece. The design is sleek, and contains two flat, bright colours that stand out against the white text. The font of the title text is simple and bold, which suits well with the overall heavy-weight design.

Probably one of the most memorable pieces of Domino’s branding design is their pizza boxes. Depending on what size pizza you are getting, you will get either a blue or red box, one with two white dots on it and one with only one – the same as their logo. The boxes themselves are like halves of a whole domino pieces.

Pizza on the Square (Local)

Pizza on the Square is a traditional Italian pizza restaurant located in Belfast. They are a high-class restaurant, which comes with all the high-class things you can think of – fresh ingredients, a finely selected menu, and gourmet-quality food.

The styling of the company is consistent throughout the restaurant, both in its branding design and the way the restaurant itself is designed to look. Classy, sophisticated and elegant – these are all words that come to mind when I see the design of this company. For their logo, they have used a stylish, timeless font. There is no image or illustration – it is simply just white text against a black background. It is clean and distinguished. It is obvious that this is a high-quality restaurant just by the look of the logo.

Establishing the Brand

To establish my brand, I need to choose a suitable tone of voice. Tone of voice represents brand personality and values. This includes the words you choose and the order in which you put them and applies to all the content you deliver — website content, social media posts, emails, and any other formats. I will need to come up with a bank or “palette” of words to help define my brand.

The name of the brand, I have decided, is ‘Flaming Pizza‘, so I need to come up with words associated with that.

Word Bank:

  • Exciting
  • Hot
  • Tasty
  • Classy
  • Quirky
  • Bold
  • Timeless
  • Stylish
  • Fresh
  • Passionate

The brand itself should also come with a suitable story. I chose ‘Flaming Pizza‘ because I thought it added an exciting twist to the brand idea. Thoughts of fresh, oven-baked pizza spring to mind. Perhaps their speciality is a spicy, ‘flaming hot’ pizza. Here is a short bio that I wrote for my brand:

We are an exciting new pizza company with a twist – everything is hot! At Flaming Pizza, we will tingle your taste buds with a variety of pizza flavours that you can choose from, each with their own level of spice. Baked with fresh ingredients by our expert staff, experience flavours such as Hot Soppressata, Spicy Mediterranean, and Pepperoni Picante. Our restaurant is based in Belfast, where you can eat in or order to go! Simply download the app or head over to the booking page on our website to order now!

Designing a Logo

Because of the name of the brand, I want to incorporate flames into the monogram or logo. I decided to start out with some sketches of initial ideas I had for the logo/monogram design:

Out of all of my sketches, I liked this idea the best:

 

Next, I decided to try and digitise my logo on Illustrator. Firstly, I had to choose a suitable font that would work well with the logo, and the overall branding. I decided to try out a variety of fonts, landing on these four as final choices:

Next, I decided to try and recreate the logo using one of these fonts. The font I chose for this sample was ‘Baloo’. Here is the result:

Although I liked how the stems of the letters looked, I wasn’t too fond of the bubbly, bold font to support it. I felt that it didn’t match well with the long, elegant lines that made up the “flames”. In response to this, I tried out the same idea with a different font, this time ‘Bodoni 72’, and the result was much better:

However, I still wasn’t entirely happy with how the logo looked. I felt that it needed to have something sitting above it to help balance out the bottom-heavy state that it was currently in. I decided to add an illustrated flame on top of the lettering, between the stems of the two flames on either side:

I was really happy with this result. I felt that it captured the feeling of the brand that I was trying to get across – exciting, classy and passionate. Next, I decided to try out the logo in different colours and tones, as I felt it looked too boring in its current state.

Here, I tried the logo against a black background, turning the actual logo itself white to contrast this. I feel that this was much more interesting than the plain black logo, but I still felt that the monotone colour scheme that I had initially planned for was not exactly as unique and interesting as I thought it would be, so I experimented with adding colour to the logo.

The obvious colour choice was red – flames, fire, hot. I feel like this was a great choice for the logo, as it really brought out the passion and freshness of the brand idea.

I also tried out the same colour but with a gradient, making the top of the red darker than the rest. This, I think, gave the logo a much more elegant and classy appearance than just a flat, bold colour, and matched well with the flames, almost as if they were shining.

Deliverables

Page 1: Logo (wordmark & symbol) and bio/story/description.

Page 2: A physical touchpoint. This could be a box, a uniform or anything that is a requirement for the business.

Page 3: A digital touchpoint. This could be a delivery ordering page, home page, menu page, app screen or any interaction that you like.

For this page, I decided to create a prototype screen of a mobile app, which would allow customers to order food directly from the restaurant. Here are my initial sketches for the app:

Next, I chose my favourite of the selection – that being the second design – and made it up digitally using Illustrator.

PDF

Here is the link to my final PDF:

Flaming Pizza – Deliverables

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