Cafe Wylde is a vegan restaurant in Everett, Washington. A friend was opening the place and asked me for a logo. The name was already decided and it pointed hard in one direction — untamed, overgrown, a little feral — and the obvious job was to draw that.
The name also splits in a useful way. "Cafe" is the plain half that tells you what the business is; "Wylde" is the half doing the promising. So almost every round I built paired two different typefaces against each other, testing which half should carry the personality and how far it could go before the other half stopped being readable. I pulled down eighteen display faces to work with — Blowbrush, Docktrin, The Dead Saloon, Vanilla Whale, CocoBiker and the rest — and started setting pairs.
The first four rounds chased the name. Brush-marker scrawls, angular art-deco caps, inline western slabs, and by round four a heavy circus-poster face with rough inked texture and both words underlined. On the sheet they looked good. As a restaurant they were wrong, and it took putting four rounds on the wall to see why: every one of them read as a bar, a barbecue pit, or a tattoo shop. They promised something loud and probably fried. This was a place serving vegetables, and the logo was setting an expectation the kitchen was never going to meet.
So round six went the other way. I threw out the display faces and set the name in classical high-contrast Roman serifs — the sort of letterform you find on a wine label or a good menu — and kept one squared bold setting on the sheet as a control, to be sure I was reacting to the work rather than to boredom. The serif was better immediately, and the reason is the word itself. Set in a display face, "Wylde" is a genre signal. Set in a Didone, it reads as a surname. It stops sounding like a theme and starts sounding like a proprietor, which is what makes a restaurant feel like a restaurant and not a concept.
Rounds eight and ten narrowed the mechanics. One condensed high-contrast serif for both words rather than a pair. Small caps against full caps. How much bigger "Wylde" should sit against "CAFE" — and eventually, not bigger at all: both words set as equal-weight caps, so neither half of the name outranks the other and the lockup reads as one line rather than a hierarchy.
That left the original problem unsolved. The type was disciplined now, and nothing in it was wild. Round twelve resolved it by splitting the job: "Organic Cuisine" in a formal italic script under the caps to do the explaining, and a line-art vine of flowering stems climbing the right side to carry the growth. Handing the wildness to an illustration is what let the type stay quiet, and the vine does structural work too — two lines of caps make a hard rectangle, and the stems break the corner so the mark has an irregular silhouette instead of sitting in a block. I tested it reduced on the same sheet, because the vine has the thinnest strokes in the drawing and they are the first thing to close up on a business card.
Twelve rounds in twelve days, May 22 to June 2, 2016, delivered as vector AI and EPS with a print PDF and a web PNG.
