Hand Drawn Rebrand For Filipino Restaurant

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Objectives

Feast your eyes on our hand drawn rebrand for Filipino restaurant Musang, based in Seattle, Washington. Read our case study to find out how we helped Chef / Owner Melissa Miranda create a strategic and cohesive brand identity to represent her business and connect with her audience. Musang opened in 2019 and after 12 months received the accolade of restaurant of the year from Seattle Met. Despite the restaurant’s commercial and critical success, its branding lacked consistency. Mel reached out to Ulysses Design Co to help create a cohesive and professional brand identity that lived up to her restaurant’s success.

Strategy

In our brand strategy session, we helped Mel define her brand foundation, target audience and market position. Together, we crafted the mission statement ‘Our mission is to bring folks together in the spirit of community with Filipino food inspired by fond childhood memories.’ We defined Musang’s brand personality as Community, Authentic, Relatable, Old Manilla and Warmth. We used these personality traits as markers to inform our brand design.

Process

The name Musang is derived from the Filipino dialect Tagalog word for wild cat. Mel had an existing wild cat brand mark that already had a strong connection with her audience. We used this as an anchor for our rebrand. We hand redrew a more simplified version of the wild cat in a style inspired by traditional tattoos and hand stitched tour patches. This gave a naive and authentic vibe to the hand drawn brand identity for the restaurant. We complimented the brand mark with a custom logotype that was inspired by hand painted Filipino signage. The badge style composition of the primary logo was inspired by vintage travel stamps and hotel coasters from 1920s Filipino culture. We built on this hand drawn brand identity with a series of iconography that adds personality and context.

Design

Using the key data we extracted from our brand strategy session, we were able to create a hand drawn brand identity for this restaurant that matched the professionalism and success of the business. Using the brand identity we created a collateral suite including signage, packaging, business cards, social media templates and branded newsletter. Cohesion was at the top of Mel’s list so we created a detailed style guide for her team to implement the brand identity. This included guidance on logo usage, colour palette, typography, iconography, photography and messaging.