Case Study - Rosetta's Kitchen
We recently had the pleasure of working on a rebrand for local Asheville restaurant Rosetta’s Kitchen.
As can happen with a homegrown brand that’s been around for years, they had developed lots of different logo versions and other art over time. One goal was to bring a more unified look to the brand while still maintaining its noncorporate brand diversity.
A temporary marketing team was created by embedded ourselves into their organization for a period of a couple of months alongside the owner and manager and fellow local marketing gurus Neff Creative.
We wanted to evolve the existing primary logo into a more refined version. It needed a variable portion for different locations when needed.
The new logo maintains the quirky charm of the original.
In addition to a new logo, updated color and font palettes, we designed six merch marks. These are illustrations to be used for merch, web and environment.
This one is a take on the classic “Mom” tattoo. We wanted to highlight Rosetta being a radical “momapreneur” and long time community steward of healthy vegetarian comfort food. Their everyone eats program is the essence of motherly love.
Rosetta’s has really been like a mom to Asheville since 2002.
A Proven Process for Creative Solutions
Let’s take a moment to highlight our process and how it solves for the success of our clients. Our process is designed to result in the creation of an authentic, effective, resonate brand. Our process begins with curious and candid inquiry. We guide the client through a discovery process via a set of strategic and fun interview process that uncovers and clarifies the unique values, needs and strengths of the client’s team and leadership. We couple that with research into their target audience, symbolic meanings and understanding the competition.
They had a bunch of existing assets that were a little dated and needed some new interpretations of these type of thematic illustrations. They had multiple versions of a logo and needed to refine that into one variable logo that could be adapted for the various locations and needs.
From there we move onto creative brainstorming. In this phase we ideate and put all “bad ideas” on the table. Once all ideas and are out, then we start to pick at each one with a critical eye. We focus in on the ones that are the strongest and agree on the elements from which to build the brand. The challenge was that they we’re too brand diverse and needed to keep that spirit while visually tightening things up into a more consistent feel.
Setting the Mood
Here is a mood board that was part of our rebrand process for Rosetta’s Kitchen. As part of our discovery sessions we identified some key elements that we wanted to incorporate into an authentic brand that would resonate with their community.
- Pirates code: egalitarian non conformist consent based culture
- Ship as a metaphor for the restaurant
- Compass rose/ guiding stars
- Magical mystical vibe
- Tattoos
- Vegetarian fare / natural
We created this mood board as our guiding north star on how the brand should feel. The purpose of this is to refer to as we developed some of the art and color palette for this project.
Sketching it Out
Now that we have established authentic and effective parameters to work within we start sketching out ideas. This stage can honestly be ugly, unrefined and full of ideas that end up in the trash. It’s an important step to work toward our end goal. Here are just a just a few of the initial sketches that John drafted up during this process.
Consistent Communication
For the duration of this project we had weekly marketing Zoom meetings with the team. During these meetings we each applied our expertise to the elements we were each working on and refined the final designs through a collaborative process. We used Discord for daily communications as that was the platform that Rosetta’s already used.
Results
Enough yakity yak about all our process blah blah blah. How about seeing the work? New logos, merch marks, style guide. Ready to fuel their reopening.
