The Buzz
Branding
overview
At first glance, it is just a token community college coffee shop, but upon closer inspection, it vends the finest baked goods on Broadway for an astoundingly low price. The fact that it is an outlet for the Seattle Central Culinary School’s bakery is underrepresented in its current state.
project specs
Time: 9 weeks
Personnel: Martin Brendecke, Frankie Ostello — equal collaboration
Roles / Skills: Branding, Environmental Graphics, Wayfinding
Tools: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop
challenge
Currently, the logo found in the college’s main entrance is bland and scarcely visible. The experiential design of the café interior is dated and confusing. Not only does it fail to inform on the cafe’s key value proposition, but it is also barren and visually unappealing.
solution
We seek to clarify the cafe’s identity, purpose, and aesthetic, more effectively advertising the uniqueness and excellence of Seattle Central’s culinary arts program to visitors, staff, and students.
We did this by honing in on what makes The Buzz special as well as data we received from polling fellow students and patrons of the cafe to help inform our design choices moving forward.
We presented our clients with 3 new logos to choose from as well assets like coffee cups and wayfinding signage to help them visualize how the brand will play across various media.
research & design process
The final concept is the culmination of research, exploration and iteration. These “tonal territories” represent examples of different routes we took in developing the brand identity. We used them as mini moodboards to design for a specific tone or style in mind, such as the Lingo board that ended up producing the final logo chosen by the client.
We developed three logo options for The Buzz to choose from after an extensive design process. We conducted surveys with the student body to gauge the needs of the consumer regarding the cafe as well as researching and compiling data on competing cafes within the neighborhood.
Martin and I both went through an exhaustive sketching and iteration phase based on the source material we compiled into tonal territories and eventually a final moodboard (see brandbook) that helped organize and guide our process.
We were pleased with the outcome knowing we had explored every option and felt strongly that this new logo and brand identity truly captured what The Buzz is all about.
logo process
This is just a fraction of our sketches, but these were the origins of the final three logos we presented to The Buzz. We were confident that all three would serve the cafe well but were hoping as a team that “Bubble B” would be chosen. As you can see in this logo tournament graphic, the Bubble B was victorious.
View the full brand guide