Restaurant & Brew Pub at the corner of Chapel + Main. The development of a brand identity.
Backstory
With the wild success of their first restaurant in Kittery, Maine, The Black Birch, owners Gaven Beaudry, Jake Smith, and Ben Lord teamed up with chef Skye Bonnie and brewer Dave Yarrington to bring high-end comfort food paired with small-batch craft beer to Dover, NH. In 2017, Chapel + Main at the corner of Chapel and Main was born.
Designing the logo
The challenge with any identity project is that you are both anticipating and creating the future vibe. The resulting logo commits the business to a tone that is hard to change later.
Their name derives from their location at the intersection of Chapel St. and Main Street. Chapel street predictably leads to one of the many churches in Dover, NH. Its churchy tower peeks out over the top of the non-descript, low-slung 70’s style building that is the unlikely home to the restaurant.
I had a taste of things to come, familiar with chef Bonnie’s knack for classy interpretations of classic New England recipes. I also had a sense of their laid-back style in their original restaurant in Kittery. Their founding restaurant is in a hard-to-find, old post office. The only clue that it’s a restaurant is the line of new guests and regulars waiting to get in.
Otherwise, I didn’t have a lot to go on. What to emphasize? Reinforce the location name by referencing intersecting street signs? Focus on the comfort food casual? Play up the uninspired 70’s mini-mall architecture with a retro fun twist?
And, who are we designing for? Who will end up being the regulars? Boomers, Gen X, Millenials, white-collar, blue-collar, t-shirts. What vibe will it have? Friendly? Edgy? Sophisticated? All of the above?
Round 1 – Finding a direction
The restaurant owners were head-down getting the building ready, working out the menu and cocktail program. It was up to me to drive the process and eke out the solution. The first step was to see which direction felt best for them. Using sample color palettes, personas, and fonts, I explored a Colonial and a 70s feel. I applied a horizontal and stacked treatment to a subset of the fonts to see where they stood on typography. I also tried type arrangements on basic shapes. Later, riffing off the crossroad nature of their name and location, I experimented with abstracting street signs. Here is the process in gory detail:
Colonial?
The food was harkening back to classics, and we were in New England. I set the mood with old New England portraits and colors. The fonts aren’t from the 1800s but lean toward stately, classic, conservative.
The creepy people 
The colonial palette 
Somber fonts
The 70s?
The strip mall architecture and chef Skye’s collection of filling station glasses got me thinking we might go in a 70s direction.
The hair, the flair 
The invention of harvest gold 
Loud fonts 
When not plaid
Toss the first pancake.
First ideas need to get out and quickly, like running the sediment out of the camp spigot. I typically start with typographic arrangements of the words. Then look for basic shapes to contain them. It’s always good to do a little sanity check now and then, dropping the logo into context – a pint glass, t-shirt, or building sign. Here are my first pancakes. I’m not sure I even presented these.
Bodoni typeface
The ampersand 
The fat ampersand 
Fat ampersand meets shapes
Nueva typeface
Starlite diner shapes 
Neuva font 
On a pint? 
On a building? 
Working with shapes 
Over-working shapes 
Should quit here 
Uh, no
Refining the typography
After the first group, I focused on a few typefaces and simple arrangements – in a line or stacked. Working on these, I noticed how the plus sign related to the cross on a chapel and a road intersection.
Horizontal format, plus sign as cross 
Plus sign in a stacked layout.
Finally, a direction – street signs
Since the restaurant is located and named after the crossroads – I worked on logo variations with a perspective of street signs.
Solid and static 
Dynamic, better figure-ground 
Variations on the intersection 
Time to see it on the building 
More true to street sign shapes 
Building again
Round 1 – Decisions, sort of
The owners were OK with pretty much everything I showed them. Either they were too polite, didn’t really know how to decide, or hadn’t seen anything that clicked. I accepted that I wouldn’t get much direction and trusted that I would somehow know when it was a hit.
For the comfort of like-minds, I decided to run ideas by the architects who were doing the build-out – ARQ Architects, Paul & Lucy. They have a clean, modern sense of design and embraced the horizontal brick of a building as a design element – long uninterrupted rectangles for the backdrop behind the bar, the opening into the visible kitchen, and the window into the brewery. The bar backdrop used a deep shiraz red.
Round 2 – Reduce and emphasize the horizontal
I stripped away unnecessary elements to align more with the look that Paul and Lucy were developing. The typefaces I was gravitating toward were Nueva and ITC Goudy Sans Std. Both are professional and have some personality without calling too much attention to themselves. I liked the gothic aspect of the A in ITC Goudy Sans – churchy, maybe even a little edgy.
Bold, trying to say something, but what? 
Bold, on a pint, perhaps 
Starting to get the cross thing happening 
Nice try but plus is too weak 
Too many ideas 
Closer, yet not
It was close, but not quite. I liked the gothic aspect of the A in ITC Goudy Sans. The plus sign did not appear to be designed for that font, it was just two intersecting lines. That would be an issue.
Finals
Keeping it simple and horizontal with the ITC Goudy Sans font, I carefully letter spaced and centered the letters vertically. Many fonts use generic plus signs – not constructed to match the style of the rest of the font. I had to design a plus sign to match the stems of the font. For situations requiring a vertical layout or shorthand – like the stamps on their kegs, I created an ankh with the letters C + M – turning them 90 degrees to represent the intersection of the streets.
The final 
Vertical marks for favicons, kegs, smaller spaces 
Something you might find in Italy.
Notes to self
It’s unnerving creating the identity for a business in the process of inventing itself, which is when you typically do this sort of thing. Every vision needs to merge. In this case, the space, food, beer, owner’s personalities, vibe, zeitgeist, and location, all needed to contribute to the “super-sign” that will be the mark of their identity. You get one shot at it. After that, it’s problematic, or even destructive to change a logo. Think Coke.
This project involved teasing out a solution by working through lots of different design directions and involving as many of the creative groups as possible. The big reward is working with people you love who make tasty food and beer.