Maggie's Diner is another concept restaurant I created to help me practice brand design. In this project I decided to branch out into merchandise design and a little bit of front-end web design!
I've taken a shine to diners in the past few years. There's something so cozy about them, yet also very fun. I took a slightly more "serious" approach to a diner vs. the usual 50's bright red, black and white thing they usually have going on. I love that vibe too and would love to make a fun and colorful brand for a future diner as well! But for now, this is my attempt at a more toned down diner.
Above are some preliminary sketches I made when brainstorming what the logo would look like. I naturally gravitated towards an egg theme in my sketches, so that's where I took it.
The muse of this project were magpies—these black and white birds whose eggs are a soft blue color with bronze flecks. That's where I grabbed the colors from! I find this is a good technique for me to get started with a project direction, especially when I start from scratch.
If I were to design the space for this restaurant I would go for some medium toned leathers that match the orange I picked, black and white tile (like a typical diner), cream colored walls to keep things simple with sprinkles of the accent colors throughout the space.
I have a love/hate relationship with t-shirts. On one hand, there's just too many t-shirts in the world. On the other hand, they are very fun to design! I would love to go more weird with my tees, but since this is a more "serious" project, I went with some toned down tees and one more colorful one with an illustration I made of a magpie and her nest.
The second picture below the tees shows those fun vintage hotel key-chains with alternates of the Maggie's Diner logo.
And finally we have stickers at the bottom there. They are the staple of any self respecting trendy eatery. You can always rely on stickers to be very cute and surprisingly expensive!
I designed a website menu for this project instead of a printed menu. It would probably be very similar to a printed version though. The only difference is the inclusion of a modified phone menu. Below is the "About" page of this fictional website.
I had a lot of fun with this project. I had a flood of other ideas, like expanding on what the interior would look like but I'm a little limited on time and skill for that at the moment. In the future I would love to make fully decorated spaces for a concept brand.
Below is a concept for a mural I painted. It shows the same magpie and her nest that is on one of the tees. This would be inside the restaurant as a sort of accent wall in the dining area.
CREDITS
Photos used:
Seat and tile shot - Photo by Lee Cartledge on Unsplash
Diner cup - Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash
Eggs - Photo by Raiyan Zakaria on Unsplash
Black & white photo - Photo by Yong Chuan Tan on Unsplash
White Brick Wall - Photo by Laura Skinner on Unsplash
Used for texture & shapes:
Old Photo Texture - svetolk
Old photo scan - jakkapan
Torn paper - warmworld
For proofs:
T-shirt proof - Touchr
Sweatshirt proofs - Taeksang
Fonts used for personal use only:
Cortair Sans
Freestyle Script
Artland
ARTIST NOTE
This project is for my personal use only, nothing is made for commercial use or for profit. All design work & composition is by me, all rights reserved. Please do not steal, copy, or redistribute in any way.
