Black and Brown

Recently these posts have been... well... black and brown.  Why am I so boring? This will change, I promise.  I'll start using what designers call "color."  It'll be neat, I swear.

The Pizza Stand

Mock business sets are especially fun, not because you get to come up with some sort of whimsical business to design for, but you also get to create a thorough campaign/identity for aforementioned business.  One isn't limited to expressing all his creativity into one logo, or one business card--rather, one can show the extent of an idea, by applying it in unity across a many faceted product.

The first part was designing the logo for my business.  I love pizza.  I did a pizza business.

I wanted, initially, for my pizza business to be one of class and high culture.  I don't know why exactly, but I think somewhere in my mind I thought it ironic to serve something so humble as pizza in a high-brow place.  So I went with it.
I called the business "The Pizza Stand," a title reminiscent of the proverbial "hotdog stand," endowing above all the informing notion that this is "a place to get pizza."
To design my logo, I drew lots of inspiration (oddly enough) from the Starbucks logo.  I was starting to want my pizza place to not be so much high class, but to be more trendy and "Starbucksy" while still retaining the initial feeling of general class.
The final logo, as pictured, is elegant, simple, refined, and inviting.  All are qualities that fit my idea for "The Pizza Stand"

I should mention that the typeface used for the main display text is a typeface that I designed.  It is called "The Bald Headed Fart" and is a combination of Bauhaus and Futura.  I'm not exactly happy with the awkward space between the A and the N on stand, but due to the nature of the font, kerning it in would only hurt it more.

For the business card, I decided to be kind of playful and not use the typical box shape.  I used the shape of the logo!

Imagine the business card above (left:front, right:back) cut out into that pac-man shape.  That's what I was going for.  The idea is that it's a fun enough shape that people will be regretful to through it away, and it's an awkward enough shape that it won't do well in a wallet!  They'll have no choice but to keep it handy in their pockets!!! Mwahahahahahaha.

Below are the envelope and letter-head.  They have been designed in unity with the logo and business card.

I'd get pizza there.  Just sayin'.

From realistic(ish) to symbolic.

The assignment was to take an object... draw it as realistically as possible... then dumb it down into a solid black pictogram or symbol.  I chose a monkey.  I went through a lot of thumbnails before I decided to do this sort of stencilly, black-mass kind of thing.  I think it turned out okay.