Craft Food Halls | New England
The Ultimate Food Experience
Craft Food Hall Project is an innovative concept incubator, exploring the best in food while pushing the bounds of entrepreneurship and creativity. It’s a pretty cool company, and we were beyond excited to help them define the brands of their three new restaurant concepts–Project X, Vessel, and Sousviderie–as well as how these brands will be experienced by customers. For us, it was a match made in design heaven: brand strategy + environmental graphics + placemaking. Done and done.
Insights
Brand Identity, Environmental Graphics, Signage, Menu and Collateral Design
Craft Food Hall Project is developing three restaurant concepts that are set to open across several locations in Massachusetts. They approached us to help them design not just the visual identities, but also the brand experiences that these restaurants will become. After an intense strategy workshop, some impassioned design charrettes, and a whole lot of cool concepting, we got to the heart of Craft Food Hall Project and its vision for these fresh, inventive brands.
Sousviderie:
The Sousviderie creates a new category within the food world: sous vide casual. It’s cutting edge, 5-star technique (smartvide and induction technology) at a 3-star value--all set in an interactive, open kitchen. The restaurant identity was designed to reflect the precise sophistication of this technology while remaining approachable and open.
Project X:
Old world pizza crust meets new world craft street science. Enter Project X, the innovative street pizza lab. For this concept, we wanted a brand identity that was edgy but inclusive, so we focused on the street culture (where all the best things happen, of course). The strong “X” in the middle of the mark is the game changer element—and it just so happens that it forms the shape of a pizza without being too gimmicky.
Vessel:
Mind, body, spirit, and soul. Vessel is a super cool restaurant that has created a lifestyle brand based on strategic, nutrition-driven recipes that optimize the body’s systems. We embraced that concept and designed a visual identity that reinforces these powerful connections with an elevated, blissful look and feel derived from our body chakras.
Craft Food Hall Project, Anchor Line Partners, RJ Kelly
The Brands
With a graffiti typeface, the Project X look is inspired from the street culture vibe for which this brand of pizza will be known. As for Vessel, we derived the graphic mark from one of our body chakras, to represent the brand promise of a powerful awakening of mind, body, and soul through superfood recipes. And then there’s the Sousviderie brand identity: a friendly circle with precise definitions of technique and quality, topped off with a degree symbol to represent high tech production.
Good Food, Good Life.
The brand promise of Vessel is to bring out your true potential by aligning your mind, body, and spirit through superfood recipes. It’s about lifestyle as much as it is about food. The visual identity was designed from one of our body chakras which spin and draw energy to keep the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health of the body in balance. The pinky peach color of the mark is a nod to Himalayan salt and its important role in sousvide cooking.
Why himalayan salt, you might ask? Did you know that Himalayan salt contains over 84 minerals and trace elements, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, copper and iron? It’s said that consuming the salt, soaking in its baths, and breathing it in will provide some pretty amazing health benefits. And with a history dating back to Earth’s creation, it’s believed to be composed of dried remnants of the original, primal sea. We thought it was a powerfully appropriate connection to the Vessel brand. Basically, we all agree that the belly rules the mind.
