This week we were tasked with coming up with a set of brand guidelines for a local brand that may not have established them publicly.

For this task, I chose to research and build a set of guidelines for an asian takeaway restaurant in Belfast called “Wok Inn” because they have very little defining their guidelines online.

(A screen capture of the top of the Wok Inn menu page).

What is a Brand Guideline?

First of all, I had to look at what brand guidelines usually entail. Brand guidelines are there to make a brand recognisable, and they should be consistent across different elements such as:

  • Logo
  • Imagery
  • Typography choice
  • Colour Palette
  • Tone of Voice
  • Story

Combining these elements consistently will be able to show a brands personality.

Brand Story:

I found that Wok Inn already have an “About” section on their website, so I took their brand story from here. It reads:

“Wok Inn is unlike your average Chinese takeaway. We have an immense amount of pride in our food and services, which is something that is reflected in every order we prepare. We do our best to offer exceptionally fast delivery times whenever it is available and we provide a quality experience for our customers. Chinese food has become a staple of food culture all around the world and we are happy to be representing this culture in and around the Belfast area. Should you be looking for a new family takeaway, with exceptional food, great customer service and motivated staff then you do not need to look any further than Wok Inn.”

Tone of Voice:

Authentic

High Quality

Pride

Efficient

Family friendly

Fresh

Great customer service

Logo:

Wok Inn’s logo is a wordmark of their brand name placed on top of a purple square with rounded edges. To me, this looked a lot like an app icon.

It is simple and to the point. The focus here is on readability, the biggest part of the logo to unpack is the connotations of colours used. I will talk more about the use of colour in the next section.

Colour Palette

When looking more at the website, I found that the colour palette made most use of the contrasting colours yellow and purple.

The logo background uses hex code #AD3F98, while the wordmark uses #FBC408. Wok Inn also included a lighter shade of purple as a background colour in parts of their website.

The colour purple usually connotes luxury, pride, extravagance and royalty. Making frequent use of this colour across the brand makes the audience associate Wok Inn with these types of adjectives. It makes us think that the food will be high quality and taste luxurious, even though it is a fairly cheap takeaway restaurant.

Yellow is the colour of happiness, optimism and positivity. This would leave a potential customer thinking that buying food from Wok Inn will bring them joy, and they’d subconsciously be feeling optimistic about the potential of the meal.

Typography

Wok Inn uses a classic and simple font for their website called Arial. This choice of typography is good as it is clear and highly readable.

Imagery

The Wok Inn website only has one photo on their website and it is, as expected, a photograph of Asian food. This showcases what they have to offer, and it displays the food in a way that makes it look very fresh and appetising. The meals displayed also look very authentic, fresh and high quality, which goes well with the tone of voice that I have determined for the brand.