Menu research...

Now that I have completed my mural I can focus on my other remaining designs, starting with the food and drinks menu. Because of the nature of the restaurant, with so many different dishes and the conveyer belt system, I want to have a clean and simple design that helps people see and choose what they want as quickly and easily as possible. I will look at different menu styles, but here are a few examples of yo!sushi's current menu design...

As you can see, the corporate colours, logo and styling are carried through to their menu design and this is something which I think is very important to create the visual identity inside the restaurant as well as outside. You can also see that it is square in shape and reads like a booklet, the most common way for menu's, and on the whole has a nice clean look to it, although I believe some pages can look cluttered due to the number and variety of dishes on offer.

As much as I like this current design, I am rebranding the restaurant for a new Berlin branch so I can change practically anything bar the dishes themselves. So I wanted to look at some menu alternatives that are already in the market.

Not being somebody who eats out a lot or in new places when I do, I had no idea that people were using menu's in such a variety different ways. Here is just a handle of some of my favourites I came across. There is an origami style, an elegant 2 or 3 fold design, a rough sort of clipboard chart design and even a new digital menu which really shows the technological times that we're currently living in. But I think my favourite out of these is the wooden style menu, but purely for aesthetic reasons.

Although the idea of a digital menu sounds ideal on most occasions, for my yo!sushi branch it would not only clash with the Berlin restaurant style, but it would be a waste as the yo! menu is only to view what is on offer, not to select and pay for like in normal restaurants. And the origami and clipboard menu's would most likely fail in the durability department, despite undoubtedly looking the best, as they would endure a lot of handling and constant use. Whereas although the sleek and elegant folded menu design would serve all the right purposes, is it lacking in creativity? Would it be knocked over all the time with the methods of the yo! dining experience? Purpose and practicality is often overlooked in design, so I need to really make sure I remember to take these into consideration.

Feeling that I have gained a great deal of influence from this research, and have a number of ideas floating around my head, I will now get designing and report back soon.

Done and dusted!

After many changes and alterations I feel that my mural design is now complete. Here is the final product, click to enlarge...

Although I will talk more about this in my development file, I will briefly explain some aspects of my design. I felt quite strongly about including some typography in my design, and used two very different typeface styles that I found in my research. One used for the infamous JFK quote "Ich bin ein Berliner!" and the other for a quote I came across that to me, really sums up Berlin's culture and the direction in which it is heading,"Berlin is a city condemned to become, not to be."

The logo has changed since early on in this project, but that is a result of my menu design that I have been working on along side this, but will discuss that when I come to showing those designs later on in my blog.

I have also added many more elements to the design and although it may look clustered at a small viewing size, blown up over a whole wall of a restaurant I think it will work brilliantly, noticing something new every time you look at it which is exactly what I was aiming for.

And finally the colour that I added to the design. Apart from faintly adding a yellow, red and black gradient over the whole designs, which helps tie in all the images, I focussed on applying the colour to the main focus images of my mural. Below shows briefly how I did this.

I wanted the colourful illustrations to be 'bursting' from these main landmarks and features of todays Berlin and pour over the rest of my design, contrasting with some of the historic black and white figures in the design. I feel this works well, and the grungy, messy style it has to it links in with the whole Berlin wall idea and feel that I was going for.

Once I have asked for final feedback and comments off my tutors, classmates and friends This design will be complete, and I can now move on to my menu design.

Mural nearly there!

Although I have been working on other designs, such as menu and direct mail, along side my mural, this has been my main focus (in this particular brief) and I believe that it is nearly complete. Touch wood.

The main differences are the arrangement and positioning of the main images, as well as the background images. I really wanted the landmarks to stand out from the rest and I have thrown them right under the viewers nose. I started the think about how the eye looks at an image (mural in this case) and how it travels. I believe that the way I have put these images together, now creates a sort of 'viewing journey' shown below...

I still have a few more ideas of how to pad out my mural design a bit more and bring some colour to it, but once I have done that I think my mural will be complete and I can focus on the other designs for this brief.

Mural update.

Progress is being made on the mural front, slow yet steady! After deciding that my main images weren't working with the rest of the design, I opted for a change in canvas shape. It may just look like I have extended the width of it, but there were a number of reasons behind this choice. The main one being practical as it would open up more space for the primary images, but also, the fact that from the start I have wanted to focus on the style of the the Berlin wall and I think these new dimensions resemble that a lot more accurately. Here is where I'm at...

I think the shape as a whole is much more positive than before, but I still hove some issues to address. Having taken away the white outlines of the images I have managed to integrate them into the design more, but I need to decide on what role I want them to play in the design and how much I want them to stand out. Something else is the empty spaces created with this new shape, I don't want to stretch images just to fill spaces because like my influence Devante Chang, I want there to be something new every time you look at it, so if anything I want it to be on the 'busier' side of things. I'm still developing though so can work on that, as well as where to put the primary images, I think maybe the centre of the design isn't the right place for them.

Mural continued...

I have started to apply some of the main images to my mural. I looked back to Javier Piraguata's style when I started doing this, and experimented with angles and positioning of the images. Here is what I have so far...

I rearranged the background slightly so that certain images wouldn't get covered and lost, however there is something about this that doesn't sit easily on the eye. I applied a white border to each image to create a 'cut-out' effect, but I'm not sure if this is stopping them blend with the background totally. It is definitely a case of trial and error, moving the images about and changing sizes until something clicks and they start to work well. Maybe even a change of canvas size would help with this, but I will continue to develop and report back soon. 

Mural images...

Having decided that I wanted some of Berlin's most prominent landmarks and popular figures to be the most noticeable in my mural, I started looking at ways I could achieve this. I think because my background is quite dull and washy, in a good way, these will need to be more bold and positioned cleverly.

Firstly I will just show how I edit each image that I want to stand out more...

Step 1: Select a clear image and crop out the main object.

Step 2: Used a layering technique, where I duplicated the image a number of times and edited the filters to such things and overlay, multiply and colour burn. Once I then found the best opacity levels for each layer, I came out with an image that was stronger in shadows and highlights, and also had a richer colour.

Step3: I created a gradient from the German flags colours, and applied this to the image using overlay.

The same steps were repeated for each image so that there was some continuity, however depending on the original image, the deep warming colours of the gradient would alter each image slightly giving each one individuality as well. Overall, I believe that this technique will help the images work well with my background, but not blend in too much and become lost.

I will work on how to incorporate these images into my mural design.

Start of mural

Having worked on my mural for the past few days, I thought I should show where I have got to up to now. Here is the basis of the background that I have put together. This is mainly made up of historic images and icons that aren't the main focus because although many people know about the majority of them, the target audience for yo!sushi is still relatively young.

Despite this still being an early stage I am happy with how the design looks. I will work on blending the images together better for the background, and also on textures and and colour tones. I will carry on with my development.

My Yo!Sushi Logo.

The first thing that I set about designing, or re-designing, was the yo!sushi logo. After a lot of thought I decided that I wasn't going to keep the pink and orange corporate colours. This was simply because I felt they would clash too much with the design style I was going for.

Here is how I edited the colours in the logo...

With the the colours of the german flag being yellow,red and black I tried to apply that to the logo. To me this immediately gives it some corporate identity towards the country. When it came to incorporating the 'Berlin' part into the logo however, it wasn't such an easy decision.

I looked at the typefaces that are used in Germany, and managed to take some photo's while I as there of some in context. They use a very strong and clean san-serif font for all their road signs called Condensed Din, and they try to use this same style on a lot of their more modern signage.

Condensed Din

Here are two attempts at using bold, strong and clean san-serif typefaces with the logo...the second having a slight eastern european feel to it.

Another typeface that really stood out to me was the 'old-school' black letter style type. This has a very stereotypical, old fashioned German look to it, but I was surprised how much it was still used today. It is no longer used in newspapers, but can still be seen on a lot of signage and on many buildings, here are some examples...

I really love this traditional look, and think it would be brilliantly contrasting with the ultra-modern yo!sushi logo. This links together the old with the new, and could be something of a them that I carry on through my mural and restaurant designs, here is what I put together.

Although I am not sure about the way the positioning of the different elements look, this is definitely the style that I am going to run with and I can review that problem at a later date when I start to apply it to my designs.