Tre Mari is an Italian bakery and deli in Toronto’s St. Clair West neighborhood that has been open since 1960. Now in its third generation, they worked with Blok Design to reimagine their identity, packaging, and visual system.

The new identity features my typeface Condor in Compressed and Condensed widths, Displaay’s Avantt and Lineto’s LL Brown, punctuated by moments of Dinamo’s ABC Honeymoon. The logo is typeset in Ivar Headline from Letters from Sweden, with a custom head serif on the A, a featured carried forward from the bakery’s previous logo.

The folks at Blok Design were kind enough to share their motivations:

With this identity our goal was to bring a staple of the community forward without losing who they are. Tre Mari is very much a family business with many different characters all coming together. To express this we knew we would like a diverse typographic language and colour palette that evoked their bold, playful side while still holding their Italian heritage and strong family roots. We felt that the final identity evokes these classic elements of Italian/ European design while still feeling contemporary, fresh and bold.

Visual identity for Carmi, a café, bar & deli and the little brother of Tripletta pizzeria, where you can grab a coffee, enjoy a hearty panuozzo, or have an aperitivo in a charming alley of old Lille.

En Pleine Nature is a Michelin-starred gourmet restaurant just outside Toulouse. The ecologically committed gastronomic enterprise uses local produce that is also sold in the affiliated bakery, wine cellar, and deli.

Chef Sylvain Joffre keeps his promise: his fresh, subtle and fragrant cuisine is born “in the wild”. This authentic cook-gardener-gatherer makes the most of the vegetables and herbs in his kitchen garden, as well as scrupulously selected regional produce. His sincere style precludes any fancy tricks: beautiful produce is worked in all its truth, magnified with juices and coulis, emblazoned with plants and flowers from the garden… all with the constant concern of keeping prices down. As for the decor, it’s a sober interior, or a pleasant terrace shaded by parasols. Highly committed to respecting nature, the chef also offers an adjoining boutique with viennoiseries, brioches and breads made with organic flour. He describes his culinary vision with the following words:

The cuisine is inspired by nature (the chef's vegetable garden, foraging…) and by the work of local producers, highlighted in the surprise menu. To set an example and raise awareness of environmental issues among customers and staff alike, we are reducing the use of imported products as much as possible, and gradually introducing actions in favor of sustainable development.

As the name suggests, “Die Genusshandlung” is a place for exquisite specialties and delicacies from near and far.

This is how brothers Florian and Jonas Imfeld are introducing their gourmet store in Stans, Switerland, which they run since 2014. In the shop one can find a huge range of regional cheese and dairy products, suitable accompaniments, and many homemade specialties from their own factory.

For these products, Luzern-based designer Manuel Alonso developed a packaging design using various colorful brushstrokes and watercolor blots echoing the vivid tones of juices and dips. NewParis and GT Walsheim are used in combination on all the delis labels.

Folkz is a contemporary shop offering traditional products in the city of Zakynthos. Its name combines the word “folks” as a reference to the people behind the products, with the initial letter of the placename “Zakynthos” replacing the final s. In the typographic logo, the name is divided into two lines to create a dynamic composition that highlights the final Ζ. The logo features the high-contrast, quirky display typeface Eklektyk by Le Laïc: Type Foundry that resembles the physical space’s design. It’s supported by Geomanist from Atipo. The color palette, inspired by the interior decoration, creates interesting contrasts, enhancing the visual identity’s contemporary approach.

Stilla Caps with ITC Serif Gothic for the branding and packaging design of The Cake Shop at The Manila Peninsula, a five-star luxury hotel that opened in the capital of the Philippines in 1976. In 2022, the hotel’s confectionery and deli is named The Peninsula Boutique.

Design by Chiu Wing Wah and Michelle Shek at Design Development, Hong Kong, with art direction by Peter Chancellor. Originally from Great Britain, Chancellor started to work in Hong Kong at the Peninsula Hotel. Design Development was the name of the in-house design agency that he set up for the redesign of the hotel group’s corporate identity. With his team, he created corporate graphics, advertising, uniforms, and packaging for hotels in China, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Cobel is a restaurant and butcher shop from Catarroja (Valencia), and very famous both in the municipality itself and in its surroundings. This establishment was born in 1989 as a butcher and later generations turned it into a hybrid of restaurant and delicatessen that offers exquisite quality meat.

In 2019, Cobel asked us to renew the design of its brand identity to pay tribute to its 30-year history. Therefore, the first thing we did for them was a new logo design and an alternative version with the letter C that became a quality seal for any of their supports. In addition, we applied this new image to the restaurant’s corporate stationery – such as business cards – and to the packaging of its products: commercial bags, packages, food paper, trays and boxes for delivery and take away.

We also adapted this graphic to staff uniforms, from branded T-shirts to embroidered aprons and work caps. And we also designed all the corporate elements for the restaurant: napkins, placemats, coasters … As for the menu design, the Cobel menu changes regularly, as its offer of lunches, dinners and meals is adapted to seasonal products. So they needed a versatile design that they could independently modify and print when needed. For this reason, we at Pixelarte selected a corporate typeface, differentiating headings from text bodies, so that they themselves could easily edit it according to their needs.

Seeing the scope that a project of this calibre could have, we suggested the client to adapt the new corporate image also to the establishment, helping them in the choice of materials and in the design and production of the interior and exterior signage. The idea fascinated them and they trusted us for the intervention in their interior design. Thus, we took care of covering the exterior facade, crystals and the banner of the local, using corporate vinyl. As for the interior lettering, we decorated the walls with both the logo and a pig die-cut in a rough iron plate, and we vinyled the bar with a slate texture to be able to write on it in the traditional way. Lastly, we made an ad hoc illustration design with a hyper-realistic watercolor technique for all the local signage, with gastronomic motifs that emulated the naturalness and freshness of its products.

Comparing before and after is a joy for the eyes… and the palate!

This December, letter spotter Christopher Bergmann (@isoletters) runs an advent calendar with a daily dosis of interesting letterforms:

There are typefaces I see every other day. And there are typefaces I’ve seen in use exactly once. This sign from Groningen, representing ‘L’ in the #AlphabetCalendar, shows one of the latter: Punten by @FontFabrik. Bonuspunten for using at least one glyph from each style.

The spiky Punten is one of several fun alphabets drawn by Luc(as) de Groot. Conceived in 1993, it was made into a full typeface and released by LucasFonts in 2002. The shop sign and flags of the Leuk & Lekker (“Nice & Tasty”) deli indeed combine glyphs from all three styles. While most letters are taken from the moderate Punten Straight, the ampersand is from Punten Extremo, and the r from the hilarious Punten Rondom (Dutch for “all around”). In the latter, “each character is entangled by its own swashes – almost a parody of the seventeenth-century mannerist calligraphy that [de Groot’s] teacher Gerrit Noordzij is so fond of”, says Jan Middendorp in Dutch Type.

Unicatessen is a deli and bistro in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The name is a portmanteau of Unikat (“one of a kind”) and Delicatessen. For the brand identity, local studio Die Gestalter paired Traulha Regulara and Italica with its sans-serif companion Traulha Lineara.

Leven is situated in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighbourhood. It reboots the classic deli experience — creating a lightened, lively and a community favorite for sandwiches, salads and deli fare.

Alias Harbour is sign-painted by Co Sign Sign Co on the front of the building. It’s not clear if they also take credit for the design.

The name is rendered with an upside-down e to indicate an unstressed vowel, or schwah (ə). This form is echoed by using an enlarged lowercase form for the other E’s, too.

This picture was obviously taken long after World War II (on 17 September 2017, to be precise) – but would you be able to tell from the typefaces? Didn’t think so. The most prominent place on this sign is taken by a bold cut of Signal, a typeface by German type designer Walter Wege released in 1931/32. The lettershapes may not exactly match the ones seen in specimens from that time, but there is no doubt that the typeface acted as the model for the sign (and the smaller version in black below). The blue slab serif letters below the left-facing fish are not just from the same period, but from the same year: The bold condensed cut of Memphis, designed by Rudolf Wolf, was released in 1932. If you want to use it digitally, Geometric Slabserif 703 from Bitstream is the only option you have. The black typeface on the awning is not from 1932, but only a few years older: Cooper Black, its italic cut having been released in the late 1920s. All in all: a harmonious whole that consistently uses type from the interwar period and was probably composed in the 1960s or 1970s.

But wait: When you look closely in the left bottom corner of the image, you can find clear proof that it is absolutely impossible that this picture was taken before World War II. Do you see the word ‘Muscheln’ (mussels)? It is set in ITC Bauhaus, a typeface that may have its roots in the same period as Signal, Memphis and Cooper, but that in this version only became available in the mid-1970s. A better picture of the green neon sign and the banner below reveals the use of Arial and some more Cooper Black. Welcome back in the present.

A year ago, Charles Bréant and his four brothers decided to open a cheese production line in a bid to diversify the family farm located in Bermonville, at the heart of the Pays de Caux, north west of Rouen. Instead of inventing a new variety, they chose to go back to basics and settled on making Camembert, Normandy’s most famous cheese. The idea wasn’t revolutionary, but it marked the opening of the only Camembert production site in the Seine-Maritime département.

What makes the Bréant family’s cheese so special then? First, it’s a Camembert fermier, meaning the entire production process is completed on the farm. All the milk comes from the family’s own herd of 200 dairy cows, and Charles knows exactly what they’ve been fed. Only raw milk is used, and the cheeses are moulés à la louche (moulded by ladle), just as they should be. After a month’s ripening, they are boxed and packaged on site, bearing a very distinctive label. [from Normandy Foodie]

For the label displaying the brand name Le 5 Frères (The 5 Brothers), the Bréant brothers asked the type designer Jean-Baptiste Levée, born and raised right next to their production site, to take care of the packaging design.

Levée and his Production Type team handled the design with great care, avoiding clichés picturing “a lazy cow or an idyllic Norman village”. Instead they dug intensively into the Maciet collection in the library of Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in the hope to refer classy packaging from the past at a time where the cheese was still a luxury product.

Eventually, they ended up with a minimalist composition: a geometrical perspective made with five triangles, one for each brother. The blue and white alternance evoques burrows in a plowed field or an endless path reaching the horizon. They paired Proto Slab (nicely set on a curve) with an early version of the now freshly released Antique Gothic (derived from a type originally designed for Louis Vuitton). Antique Gothic’s distinctive ‘5’ and its various capital heights helped the brand define its own voice on the stalls of local shops and delicatessen.

‘We really wanted to try something different and our main aim was to target a younger audience with our packaging,’ says Charles. The blue and white triangles sure do stand out!

The brand name set in Antique Gothic is also printed on the wooden side of the box.

Charles Bréant, along with his four brothers, is the founder and producer of Le 5 Frères. He’s pictured in his production line proudly showing the camembert and its packaging.

Le 5 Frères boxes displayed in a refrigerated stall. Le 5 Frères is mainly sold at local markets, cheese shops and delicatessen, and is also on the menu of several restaurants across Normandy.

Guayapi is a French firm founded in 1990 by Claudie Ravel, to find a market for unique noble hand-picked plants from wild Amazon jungle and the hills of Sri Lanka, for use as super-foods, delicatessen products and cosmetics. Guayapi sells Sri Lankan teas and spices, cultivated using methods that support biodiversity. Guayapi works very close with aboriginal communities and is aware of the environmental and social issues they face.

After 25 years of existence, it was time to redesign the existing logo and packaging. Anne-Dorothée Schulz, then 5.5 designstudio’s graphic designer, conceived a new logotype with the curveless Minotaur typeface, echoing the organic side of the brand while “drawing a line between premium products and the raw feature of Guayapi”. The toucan, formerly only seen on packages, has been redrawn and introduced to the capital ‘G’, creating a zoomorphic initial, which can stand as a logo for itself.

Regarding the packaging, 5.5 designstudio has put all its expertise into creating a high-class yet meaningful box:

— The first horizontal color stripe indicates the product’s nature: green for super-foods, orange for delicatessen, and pink for cosmetics.
— The second horizontal color stripe holds an all-over pattern of pictograms of the plant, designed by Schulz in the vein of Minotaur. The color refers to the natural tone of the plant.
— The third horizontal color stripe denotes the virtue of the product: detoxificating, energizing, calming …
— The vertical stripe, featuring the “Guayapi green”, also displays a small pictogram indicating what’s to be found in the case (powder, pills, seeds, capsules…) and the name of the product set in Gotham.
— Last but not least, the lid is always the same, with the Guayapi logo printed on the side and the toucan ‘G’ embossed on the top.

On Rye is a fast-casual sandwich shop, with a space in the US capital of Washington DC, inspired by the Jewish deli. It has a menu of unexpected recipes that dial down the salt and bumps up the veggies, uses natural and wholesome ingredients, and gives traditional dishes a modern twist. On Rye has an interior that brings a contemporary finesse to retrospective detailing and features a brand identity designed by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and his team. The brand identity functions on a few different levels. It works as an expression of On Rye’s wholesome menu, honours the origins of the Jewish deli in the US and adds to interior using contrast, in the weight of type, the brightness of colour and the playful qualities of photography within a space of earthy materials and traditional fixtures and fittings.

Read more about this project on BP&O.

The website uses URW’s version of Franklin Gothic.

A gastronomic homage to Experimental Jetset’s iconic “John & Paul & Ringo & George” t-shirt, see T-Shirtism.

Deli bag for cold cuts from Tops supermarket.

Freddie’s Deli is a deli based in Paris, France, created by Kristin Frederick. The logotype combines the shape of two sandwiches with the delicious and gorgeous Tartine Script.

Christopher Simmons of The Message Is Medium Rare:

“Like their burger, the Wise Sons menu features an eclectic mix of typographic flavors that pair effortlessly with one another. Copperplate is the nostalgic standard used for the headings. It establishes Wise Sons in the tradition of the neighborhood deli — proud but unassuming. Refined but accessible. Fastidious but friendly. The descriptions are set in Brandon Grotesque — a Futura lookalike whose rounded corners give it a less authoritarian feel than its ’20s-era antecedent. The script, Royal Script, is an unpredictable but inspired choice. Like a garnish it is used selectively (for prices and a few callouts) to provide contrast to the more substantive portions of the menu.

I used to think that Copperplate was an inherently bad typeface. I had a pretty closed mind about Bank Gothic, too, until we finally found a place to (almost) use it. In college I let a friend convince me that Franklin Gothic was ugly. Most designers will tell you that Mistral is an abomination. Mrs Eaves is too nineties. Gotham is too recognizable. Times New Roman is boring. The point is, we are too often limited by what we think we know. Too often we accept rules without testing them (or making them) ourselves. It’s generally better to make your mind up about something after you’ve tried it rather than before.”

In 2010, Demian Conrad created a new visual identity for Gabbani. Established in 1937, the Lugano restaurant is one of the oldest delicatessen in the Italian part of Switzerland.

Read about the work and see more images on demianconrad.com.

Photos: Olivier Lovey, Sylvain Meltz, Adrien Cater and Virginie Otth

The logo is based on Plak Extra Condensed, a 1930s display typeface by Paul Renner, the designer of Futura.

New logo application

Table with packaging

Handy bag and food foils

2 bottles of vinegar

Card family

Wine card layout

Newspaper advertising

Invitation card with beautiful patterned figures from ITC Tiffany Heavy by Ed Benguiat

Invitation

Poster B24

Melly’s Cookie Bar on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam offers home-baked cookies and gourmet coffee. The organic-looking typeface is Euphorigenic, a freebie from Ray Larabie (Typodermic, 1999) with descending capitals and an eccentric g. It reminds me a little of Phaeton. Euphorigenic is used both for the identity and signage as well as for the packaging of Melly’s Argentine-style products like alfajores and dulce de leche.

What a weird ampersand! Pretty eccentric, considering that it is quite a crucial glyph in a wedding script. This is Flemish Script (from Bitstream), spotted at Laib & Liebe, a deli/coffee bar in Hamburg-Altona. The ampersand has been tamed down in Monotype’s Flemish Script II.