Clean Plate Society is a club and catering venture that develops and serves seasonal menus. Its services include private dining events and catering. The identity was designed by James Mudd and is set in Romie Regular, designed by Margot Lévêque.

The script used for “inaugural” is yet unidentified. Young Gallant is similar.

Grazegrind is a restaurant and caterer located in Brisbane, Australia. Their identity was designed by Studio Gangplank, and is set entirely in Type Dynamic’s Larsseit Medium. The typeface’s iconic double-storey g has been entirely replaced by the alternate single story g, which means the single-letter logo is one that features only alternate glyphs. The logo and rest of the identity feature punctuation set in pink to contrast the rest of the text set in a dark teal colour.

Larsseit and other “quirky geometrics” seem to have fallen out of favour a bit since their popularity spike in the early to mid-2010s, so I am interested to see if the genre ever makes a comeback, or gets some sort of reboot in a few decades. For now, I still enjoy seeing Larsseit.

In the very heart of Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, half way between Sky Tower and Victoria Park, sits Bowler, a contemporary eatery. As the name indicates, their specialty is breakfast and salad bowls, but they also offer coffee, cookies, and freshly prepared smoothies.

Fresh could also be the word to describe the visual communication of Bowler. Conceived by Studio 024, it’s based on a recognizable palette of earthy to radiant tones, a humorous selection of images, and a straightforward typography with cartouche-like obrounds around principle buzzwords.

Which brings us to the next fresh thing: the typeface Image Future, a fresh entry in Production Type’s still fresh Beta Program. Launched three months ago, the Beta Program offers more than 150 fonts, some of which have been in development for years but haven’t been officially released yet; others, like Image Future, very recent designs that the designers might not regard as quite completed. To access the Beta Program, (free) registration is required.

Image Future marks the entrance on the scene of type design of Guillaume Goron, a graduate of the prestigious École Estienne and ENSAAMA in Paris. His typeface family can be characterized as a geometric sans serif and spans a range of ten weights from Hairline to Black. Rather short ascenders and descenders allow for tight linespacing. The letterspacing is likewise very tight by default – a feature as much reminiscent of 1980s advertising as conveying freshness in today’s graphic design. Bowler exclusively uses the heaviest weight, Image Future Black.

Graille is a no-holds-barred canteen for schools that don’t have a catering solution to offer their pupils. Meals are cooked with fresh, local produce every day by a chef in Lyon in their restaurant/kitchen. In addition, they are developing and installing vending machines directly in the schools, so that pupils can have healthy meals every day.

They contacted French art director Dirtypote to design their global identity. He developed a logo, a color scheme, and a typographic universe around “movement”, which refers to the products that fall from behind the glass of the dispenser into your hands.

The font used for the project is Gustavo (from Lift Type), for the logo the lowercase a and e have been modified to match the size of the uppercase.

This identity is accompanied by illustrations featuring a multitude of culinary ingredients to show Graille’s interest in local, fresh produce.

The food delivery category is home to either the interesting but unhealthy or the fitness-focused but bland. The approach of Singapore based online restaurant Grain aims to add an experimental and wholesome approach, as a breath of fresh air in the staid category: “a world where we don’t have to choose”. The brand belief is “food has no limits”, where the best part of each day is answering the question, “What will we eat next?”

Dish names went from functional descriptors to a unique Grain naming structure – one part familiar, one part surprise. The primary typeface is Funkis A, with two secondary typefaces – Kapra Neue and Windsor Extra Bold Condensed – the latter used to emphasise the surprising element. Typically boring and functional nutritional information was also shared through the curious, yet fun Grain tone, bringing experimentation and fun back to healthy food.

Forking good food for forking good people!

A confident brand identity for Fork Catering that plays with bright colour and simple, bold type. Steinbeck acts as the primary brand typeface, being used for its quirky, irregular forms. DM Sans and DM Mono play supporting roles.

Sunday Supply is the title of Lunchbox’s first offline exhibition, presented on May 23, 2021 at Is A Gallery, Shanghai:

Lunchbox, a creative caterer based in Shanghai, has observed food purchasing patterns at retailers, restaurants, and city food suppliers of all scales, noticing what people are buying or not buying. At teatime on Sunday, Lunchbox will provide a buffet of foods that are normally less commodified, fetishized, or delicately presented in Shanghai’s broader culinary ecology.

For the poster design, I combined Times New Roman and Helvetica (English) with Source Han Serif (Chinese).

Borrowed Bits offers platters and grazing tables styled to suit any occasion or event in Sydney, Australia. Sunflower Web did a redesign for Borrowed Bits, resulting in a website and identity that reflects the unique and stylish setup that Borrowed Bits offers to the customers.

The logo for Borrowed Bits is made with Brusher (slightly modified). Brusher is also used throughout the website for headings, which enforced Borrowed Bits’ identity. The sans serif used for text is Avenir.

The cover is very striking and with use of a stylised swift or swallow looking almost like a cross between Thyre-Lee Elliott’s new Imperial Airways “Speedbird” symbol and Alexander’s Motor Services of Scotland’s Bluebird symbol. [“Party Outings” is lettering.]

London Transport, formed in 1933 to amalgamate and coordinate the operations of the capital's various transport undertakings, carried on in the tradition of its predecessors in promoting transport opportunities, particularly those outside peak hours when capacity could be put to good and profitable use. Also in the tradition of the Underground Group the quality of much of their publicity material was second to none and amongst the best of the contemporary crop.

This 1935 “Party Outings” brochure is no exception. Unusually it shows no artist or designer yet it is designed within an inch of its life, using typography and collage photography to provide a very modern look. It is printed at one of the finest contemporary presses, the Curwen Press, and uses Kabel amongst others – unusually not LT’s own corporate typeface Johnston.

This page shows amongst other information a selection of restaurants and tea gardens that could cater for ‘numbers’. They include destinations that even then were on the edge of the rapid suburban growth that was often fuelled by the development of LT’s services! The destinations vary from outer London (such as Edgware), acknowledged Chiltern destinations and, of course, Southend on Sea as this was at the time part of a through services arrangement with the District line.

This centre double page shows an interesting variation on the then ‘new’ tube map, or railway diagram, by Beck, showing the extent of availablility of party travel tickets for children.

Sydney based hospitality group The Fresh Collective delivers exceptional experiences and event catering services across a portfolio of premium event venues, cafés, restaurants and retail stores in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Previously called Fresh Catering the group underwent a rebrand to better reflect their offering beyond catering. As a result they needed to update their online presence. Harley Johnston Design was approached to help showcase their offering online. After discussions about the goals of the project we set about mapping out the different sections of the site. The Fresh Collective website needed to clearly show the three main areas of the business; Catering & Events, Cafe & Store, and Dining & Bars in an easy to navigate fashion, these areas were housed in an elegant slide out multi levelled navigation panel. The complex site structure was also assisted in the cleanly resolved footer which highlights the main sections as well as the most visited pages.

The aesthetic style used the brand identity with plenty of considered white space and a split screen image treatment which allows the beautiful photography to shine. A boxed grid style is due throughout the site to connect relevant information in a precise fashion. Careful attention was paid to animations and transitions to allow areas like the scrolling split screen effect, image galleries, fixed footer and main navigation to feel natural and effortless. The yet unreleased Söhne from Klim was used for body copy and subheadings, with Le Jeune Deck by Commercial Type in all caps for headlines and sentence case for quotes.

One of the main focusses of users is finding the perfect venue for their next event. Seeing as Fresh offers over 100 venue spaces in three states we designed an easy way for users to filter the venues based on their needs. This filter was carefully considered for both mobile and desktop and can be called upon easily even when scrolling through all the venues.

Various levels of spaces needed different amount of content on each page, showcase venues are exclusive to Fresh and offer multiple spaces inside where as some spaces are independent and have less info. To cover this a module approach was taken to allow venues information to be covered in a clear and elegant way.

Studio Photography: Jason Loucas
Brand Identity: Juicy Creative
Web Design: Harley Johnston Design
Web Development: Assemble (NZ)

Karma Kitchen provide innovative catering spaces, with a flexibility normally reserved for the co-working and media community. The challenge was to create a brand which felt every bit as vivid as the makers, start ups and chefs who utilise the space.

With the food and beverage industry being just as fast paced and varied as the media/maker counterparts, the facilities on offer are way behind the demand that is there. Karma Kitchen fills this gap by offering flexible kitchens, packing and distribution areas and co-working desks all in one place.

We created a bold visual identity, icon and illustration styles and a graphic application to the physical space. Giving Karma Kitchen a brand that speaks the same language as the fast moving start-ups and ventures who will make best use of their services.

The identity uses Raisonné, a geometric sans-serif type initially designed in and around the summer of 2010 by Benjamin Critton & Colophon Foundry.

Aleno is an online app that provides digital solutions for restaurants to get organized and increase profit. It is the clever reservation system for restaurants. Digital tools for the catering industry with suitable solutions that shorten and simplify administrative processes.

Casa Pape is a ship chandler in Vigo, Spain, founded in 1946 by Don Jose Maria Perez Rodriguez, the owner of a small grocery store who soon realized that merchant ships needed large amounts of food and drinks to stock during long voyages between ports.

Their logo is in Beans (thanks to Stewf for the identification).

Supercatering is a nice Slovenian catering company using XXII YeahScript in their logo.

British Transport Catering Services – Wine List and Menu from “The Merseyside Express”

The old British Transport Commission (that existed from 1948 until 1962) – and of which British Transport Catering was a subsidiary – had very high standards of graphic design and typography as this menu card and wine list cover shows. I suspect that the artwork is by Eric Fraser (although it is unusual for them not to show “EF” I will admit) as he undertook others in this series of “named train” cards. The design is based around the mythical “Liver Bird”. The “Merseyside Express” not surpringly ran between London Euston and Liverpool and is the shortened name for the “London – Merseyside Express” that had been introduced by the pre-nationalisation London Midland & Scottish Railway in 1927 although an earlier version, the name conferred on the 1730 ex-Euston, was introduced by the LNWR in 1905. Dinner – quite an event – was prices at 12/- (12 shillings – about 60p in decimal coinage).