Poke Chef

Menu redesign and brand refresh for a local business

Team: Solo project

Timeline: Three weeks

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Problem

I was employee at Poke Chef in San Luis Obispo as a shift lead. In my time working at Poke Chef, I started to notice that customers often really struggled with ordering at our store. Often people would come in, look over the tv screens, posters, and pamphlets all with different items displayed and ask me “what do you even sell here?” The signage was chaotic, with various colors, typography, and displays scattered on the walls and countertops, leaving the restaurant with minimal brand identity and confused customers. I brought up this opportunity for improvement to the owners and they hired me to redesign their menu.

Design Process

Branding

Poke Chef is a Hawaiian Asian fusion takeout place that due to its location, is primarily selling to college students. The owners have always gone with a more hip, fun, and casual environment that I wanted to be reflected in the colors, iconography, and typography for the brand makeover. I used a tropical color palette that is representative of the colors you can find in a poke bowl. For the headline typeface I used Hayate which has semblance of Asian lettering style to signify that Poke Chef is an Asian fusion restaurant. As for body copy, I chose the typeface Century Gothic because I like the simplicity of the sans serif because it is be easily legible on a tv screen and complimentary to Hayate.

Logo

I then developed a new logo that repurposed the older one. It takes a long look to realize that the original logo is a knife that is a fish and from afar the splashy brushstrokes just come off as messy. Including the knife and the fish were integral to the logo as I felt like it was the best visual representation of the Poke Chef name. After some different thumbnail sketches (including a slightly scary butcher knife decapitating a fish), I decided to separate the fish and the knife and cross them. Having a circular logo rather than an amorphous one made it cleaner and more versatile for things like branding collateral – think stickers, t-shirts, and packaging. I kept the knife and the fish simple while still having artistic details such as fish scales and a more animated style for the fun flair.

Iterate

With so many menu items and information, establishing a hierarchy of information was my first step. The primary brand colors would be used for heading 1 and 2 as well as paragraph and the secondary colors for the rest. The owners wanted to de-emphasize the prices so that the food itself is the first thing to catch the eye, so I used the yellow color for the pricing. Another problem I witnessed having worked at Poke Chef was that many people with food restrictions didn’t know that certain items we carried weren’t suitable for their restrictions and I often had to remake people’s bowls. Not only did that cause more friction in the experience for the customer, but having to remake bowls is a financial loss for the company. Thus, I created an allergen key with vegan and gluten-free icons to apply to each item and make the menu more accessible to those with food restrictions or allergies.

Finalize

With so much information on one screen, spacing is incredibly important. It took me multiple iterations to change format, leading, and kerning to improve legibility. There were also improvements to be made to the hierarchy that I created in my first iteration that were inconsistent. After attempting to fit everything on two TV screens, I talked to the owners about having a third screen so that the text size could be bigger and the menu less crowded. I redesigned it for the third screen which is what we ultimately settled on.

Takeaways + Future Steps

The first day that it was displayed a customer came in, looked at the new menu, and said, “that looks awesome” unprompted, which was a big step up from “what do you even sell here?” Good design causes joy!
I realized after a good 10 hours into my project that using only Adobe Illustrator was a big mistake and I needed to head over to InDesign because trying to format on Adobe Illustrator is a long and painful process. Reformatting the menu in InDesign would be my next step.
Poke Chef’s website is outdated and poorly designed. Every time I look up a restaurant, I go to their website, and I can guarantee that others do the same. Redesigning the website to be consistent with the new branding, will drive more in person and online sales for Poke Chef.